Engineering Chiral and Topological Orbital Magnetism of Domain Walls and Skyrmions

TL;DR

This paper provides a quantum-mechanical analysis of chiral and topological orbital magnetism in spin systems, showing how spin-orbit interactions can be used to tune orbital magnetism, with implications for chiral orbitronics.

Contribution

It introduces a rigorous quantum approach to understand and control orbital magnetism in chiral magnetic textures, linking real-space topology with reciprocal space topology.

Findings

Quantized orbital magnetism as a Landau-Peierls response

Spin-orbit interaction enables tuning of orbital magnetism

Potential for experimental engineering of chiral orbitronics

Abstract

Electrons which are slowly moving through chiral magnetic textures can effectively be described as if they where influenced by electromagnetic fields emerging from the real-space topology. This adiabatic viewpoint has been very successful in predicting physical properties of chiral magnets. Here, based on a rigorous quantum-mechanical approach, we unravel the emergence of chiral and topological orbital magnetism in one- and two-dimensional spin systems. We uncover that the quantized orbital magnetism in the adiabatic limit can be understood as a Landau-Peierls response to the emergent magnetic field. Our central result is that the spin-orbit interaction in interfacial skyrmions and domain walls can be used to tune the orbital magnetism over orders of magnitude by merging the real-space topology with the topology in reciprocal space. Our findings point out the route to experimental engineering of orbital properties of chiral spin systems, thereby paving the way to the field of chiral orbitronics.