Interplay among helical order, surface effects and range of interacting layers in ultrathin films

TL;DR

This study uses classical Monte Carlo simulations to explore how surface effects, interaction range, and film thickness influence the magnetic order and phase transitions in ultrathin helical films.

Contribution

It provides new insights into the interplay of surface effects, interaction range, and film thickness on helical order stability and phase transition nature in ultrathin films.

Findings

Helical order is stabilized at lower temperatures as film thickness decreases.

No first-order phase transition is observed across analyzed sizes.

Helical pitch softens with increasing temperature in the ordered phase.

Abstract

The properties of helical thin films have been thoroughly investigated by classical Monte Carlo simulations. The employed model assumes classical planar spins in a body-centered tetragonal lattice, where the helical arrangement along the film growth direction has been modeled by nearest neighbor and next-nearest neighbor competing interactions, the minimal requirement to get helical order. We obtain that, while the in-plane transition temperatures remain essentially unchanged with respect to the bulk ones, the helical/fan arrangement is stabilized at more and more low temperature when the film thickness, n, decreases; in the ordered phase, increasing the temperature, a softening of the helix pitch wave-vector is also observed. Moreover, we show also that the simulation data around both transition temperatures lead us to exclude the presence of a first order transition for all analyzed sizes. Finally, by comparing the results of the present work with those obtained for other models previously adopted in literature, we can get a deeper insight about the entwined role played by the number (range) of interlayer interactions and surface effects in non-collinear thin films.