Instabilities in monoaxial chiral magnets under a tilted magnetic field

TL;DR

This paper investigates the phase transitions and instabilities in monoaxial chiral magnets under tilted magnetic fields, providing a detailed analysis of soliton interactions and stability mechanisms at zero temperature.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive analysis of phase transitions, including the role of soliton interactions and instabilities, in monoaxial chiral magnets under tilted magnetic fields.

Findings

Identification of continuous and discontinuous phase transitions.

Proper description of discontinuous transitions via interacting-soliton picture.

Elucidation of soliton and surface modulation instabilities.

Abstract

We thoroughly study the zero temperature properties of monoaxial chiral spin systems under a tilted magnetic field. The magnetic phase diagram includes two kinds of continuous phase transitions and one discontinuous phase transition. We clarify the properties of the phase transition in terms of the helical wave picture and the particle (soliton) picture and also in terms of the interaction between solitons. The interacting-soliton picture properly describes most of the discontinuous phase transition. In addition, we investigate several instabilities of the modulated structures such as an isolated soliton and the surface modulation, since their instabilities should be important to the changes of the magnetic properties. For this purpose, we perform the analyses based on the energy landscape as well as the excitation spectrum; the former approach gives an intuitive interpretation. We clarify the mechanisms of the instabilities through these analyses and draw the stability lines of solitons in the magnetic phase diagram.