Skyrmions in van der Waals centrosymmetric materials

ORAL

Abstract

Skyrmions can appear in non-centrosymmetric materials due to non-vanishing Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interactions (DMIs). We investigate the magnetic properties of rhombohedral MX3 (M: V, Cr, Mn, Fe; X: Cl, Br, I) with van der Waals materials with centrosymmetric lattices. We found that the Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya vector acting between the second nearest neighbor sites of the intralayer is non-zero and large even in MX3, owing to the breaking of the local inversion symmetry. Large DMIs cause nanoscale magnetic vortices, the so-called skyrmions in MX3. We observe not only conventional skyrmions in CrCl3 and VCl3 but also antiferromagnetic skyrmions in FeCl3 and merons in MnCl3. Furthermore, the skyrmions in CrCl3 and VCl3 have different helicities, indicating the possibility of controlling the helicity by electron/hole doping in MX3 materials. Van der Waals materials have high degrees of freedom in heterostructures and twisted structures, demonstrating promising potential as skyrmion materials.

[1] Hung Ba Tran, Yu-ichiro Matsushita, arXiv:2209.02333 (2022).

*This work was supported by MEXT via the "Program for Promoting Researches on the Supercomputer Fugaku" (JP-MXP1020200205) and JSPS KAKENHI via the "Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research(A)" Grant Number 21H04553. The computations in this work were performed using the Fugaku supercomputer provided by the RIKEN Center for Computational Science, the Supercomputer Center at the Institute for Solid State Physics at the University of Tokyo, and the TSUBAME3.0 supercomputer at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

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Presenters

  • Hung B Tran

    • TiTech
    • TokyoTech.

Authors

  • Hung B Tran

    • TiTech
    • TokyoTech.

  • Yu-ichiro Matsushita

    • TokyoTech.