Helical and skyrmion lattice phases in three-dimensional chiral magnets: Effect of anisotropic interactions

TL;DR

This study investigates how anisotropic interactions influence helical and skyrmion lattice phases in three-dimensional chiral magnets, revealing that uniaxial stress can modulate magnetic orders and induce skyrmion creation or annihilation.

Contribution

It demonstrates that interaction anisotropy, controlled by uniaxial stress, significantly affects magnetic phases and skyrmion dynamics in chiral magnets, supported by variational and Monte Carlo methods.

Findings

Uniaxial stress can induce various helical orders.

Skyrmions can be created or annihilated by uniaxial pressure.

Interaction anisotropy is key to magnetic order modulation.

Abstract

In this work, we study the magnetic orders of the classical spin model with the anisotropic exchange and Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions in order to understand the uniaxial stress effect in chiral magnets such as MnSi. Variational zero temperature (T) calculated results demonstrate that various helical orders can be developed depending on the magnitude of the interaction anisotropy, consistent with the experimental observations at low T. Furthermore, the creation and annihilation of the skyrmions by the uniaxial pressure can be also qualitatively reproduced in our Monte Carlo simulations. Thus, our work suggests that the interaction anisotropy tuned by applied uniaxial stress may play an essential role in modulating the magnetic orders in strained chiral magnets.