Magnetic skyrmions are topological solitons with a nanoscale winding spin texture that hold promise for spintronics applications. Until now, skyrmions have been observed in a variety of magnets that exhibit nearly parallel alignment for the neighbouring spins, but theoretically, skyrmions with anti-parallel neighbouring spins are also possible. The latter, antiferromagnetic skyrmions, may allow more flexible control compared to the conventional ferromagnetic skyrmions. Here, by combining neutron scattering and Monte Carlo simulations, we show that a fractional antiferromagnetic skyrmion lattice with an incipient meron character is stabilized in MnSc2S4 through anisotropic couplings. Our work demonstrates that the theoretically proposed antiferromagnetic skyrmions can be stabilized in real materials and represents an important step towards implementing the antiferromagnetic-skyrmion based spintronic devices.
@article{arxiv.2009.11432,
title = {Fractional antiferromagnetic skyrmion lattice induced by anisotropic couplings},
author = {Shang Gao and H. D. Rosales and F. A. Gómez Albarracín and Vladimir Tsurkan and Guratinder Kaur and Tom Fennell and Paul Steffens and Martin Boehm and Petr Čermák and Astrid Schneidewind and Eric Ressouche and Daniel C. Cabra and Christian Rüegg and Oksana Zaharko},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2009.11432},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
14 pages, 11 figures, submitted version with necessary edits