Formation and growth of skyrmion crystal phase in a frustrated Heisenberg antiferromagnet with Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction

TL;DR

This study explores the emergence and expansion of skyrmion crystal phases in a frustrated antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model with Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction, revealing that even small DMI can induce skyrmions at low temperatures.

Contribution

It demonstrates that minimal DMI strength can produce skyrmion phases and employs an advanced Monte Carlo method for accurate phase boundary detection.

Findings

Skyrmion phase appears at DMI as low as 0.02.

Phase diagrams show first-order transitions and tricritical points.

Parallel tempering Monte Carlo effectively locates phase boundaries.

Abstract

We study the formation and growth of a skyrmion crystal (SkX) phase in a frustrated antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model on a triangular lattice with Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI) in the presence of an external magnetic field. We build phase diagrams in the temperature-field parameter plane, featuring first-order phase transitions and tricritical points, and study their evolution with the increasing DMI strength. It is found that already relatively small DMI intensity can lead to the appearance of the SkX phase at low temperatures in the vicinity of the meeting point of the remaining helical, coplanar up-up-down, and vortical-like ordered phases. By means of a parallel tempering (PT) Monte Carlo algorithm we find that the minimum value of DMI, at which the skyrmion phase emerges, $D_t \approx 0.02$, is one order of magnitude smaller then previously reported. We demonstrate the efficiency of PT in reliable and precise location of the phase boundaries between different phases separated by either very large (strong first-order transition) or barely detectable energy barriers, where the standard Monte Carlo approach may easily fail to find a stable solution.