Topological magnetic excitations represent an active frontier of research in condensed matter physics. The introduction of various types of antiferromagnetism can further enrich the degrees of freedom and expand the topological phase space. Here we propose a generic strategy to properly characterize the topological magnetic excitations on a honeycomb lattice with zigzag-type antiferromagnetic correlations, featured by ferromagnetism along the chains and antiferromagnetism between neighboring chains. The enabling step is to map the honeycomb lattice onto a quartet lattice whose irreducible unit cell contains four inequivalent spin sites, from which all the emergent magnetic excitations can be derived and properly described. In the presence of easy in-plane or out-of-plane anisotropy, we can readily disentangle the intricate magnetic textures from atomistic magnetics simulations, leading to the identification of meronic or skyrmionic excitations due to creation of vortex-antivortex pairs or Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction, respectively. Such topological magnetic excitations can emerge in some or all of the four sublattices, thus underpinning the critical need to generalize the well-studied scalar topological charge to an effective four-component vectorial form.

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• Magnetic texture
• Magnetization dynamics
• Skyrmions
• Spin dynamics
• Antiferromagnets
• Chiral magnets
• Landau-Lifschitz-Gilbert equation
• Spin lattice models