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The quantum nature of skyrmions and half-skyrmions in Cu2OSeO3

journal contribution
posted on 2018-08-07, 13:48 authored by Oleg Janson, Ioannis RousochatzakisIoannis Rousochatzakis, Alexander A. Tsirlin, M. Belesi, Andrei A. Leonov, Ulrich K. Roessler, Jeroen van den Brink, Helge Rosner
The Skyrme-particle, the skyrmion, was introduced over half a century ago in the context of dense nuclear matter. But with skyrmions being mathematical objects -special types of topological solitons -they can emerge in much broader contexts. Recently skyrmions were observed in helimagnets, forming nanoscale spin-textures. Extending over length scales much larger than the interatomic spacing, they behave as large, classical objects, yet deep inside they are of quantum nature. Penetrating into their microscopic roots requires a multi-scale approach, spanning the full quantum to classical domain. Here, we achieve this for the first time in the skyrmionic Mott insulator Cu 2 OSeO 3. We show that its magnetic building blocks are strongly fluctuating Cu 4 tetrahedra, spawning a continuum theory that culminates in 51a ‰nm large skyrmions, in striking agreement with experiment. One of the further predictions that ensues is the temperature-dependent decay of skyrmions into half-skyrmions.

History

School

  • Science

Department

  • Physics

Published in

Nature Communications

Volume

5

Citation

JANSON, O. ... et al, 2014. The quantum nature of skyrmions and half-skyrmions in Cu2OSeO3. Nature Communications, 5, Article number 5376.

Publisher

© Macmillan Publishers Limited

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2014-09-24

Publication date

2014-11-04

Notes

This paper is closed access.

ISSN

2041-1723

eISSN

2041-1723

Language

  • en

Article number

5376

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