Confinement-Induced Metastability and Structural Diversity of Hopfions in Chiral Magnetic Films

TL;DR

This paper explores the formation, stability, and manipulation of hopfions in chiral magnetic films, revealing new types, stability conditions, and potential for texture engineering in confined systems.

Contribution

It introduces four distinct hopfion types, analyzes their metastability and interactions, and demonstrates how to tune and stabilize them in confined chiral magnetic and liquid crystalline systems.

Findings

Four types of isolated hopfions identified.

Hopfions can be continuously tuned via anisotropy.

Periodic hopfion lattices are inherently unstable under confinement.

Abstract

Topological particle-like excitations such as skyrmions and hopfions offer rich opportunities for spintronic and photonic applications. While skyrmions have been extensively studied, the stabilization mechanisms and phase behavior of three-dimensional hopfions remain largely unexplored. Here, we investigate the formation, stability, and interactions of hopfions in thin chiral magnetic films with surface anchoring, using three-dimensional micromagnetic simulations within a material-independent framework applicable to both magnetic and liquid crystalline systems. We identify four distinct types of isolated hopfions, generated by rotating bimeron and finger-like solitons around a central axis. The metastability regions of these precursor textures closely follow the boundaries of modulated finger phases, enabling their size to be continuously tuned through anisotropydriven inflation and collapse. Remarkably, we demonstrate that hopfions near their inflation threshold possess energies comparable with the homogeneous state, allowing them to enclose regions of modulated phases or other solitons, forming higher-order, bag-like domains. In contrast, periodic hopfion lattices remain intrinsically unstable under confinement, spontaneously relaxing into finger phases. These findings establish general principles for stabilizing, tuning, and assembling three-dimensional topological solitons in confined chiral systems, suggesting experimentally accessible routes for texture engineering in liquid crystals via electric-field control.