• Accepted Paper

Properties of the skyrmion crystal in the Heisenberg triangular lattice with scalar chirality

H. Bocquet, C. J. Ganahl, M. S. Scheurer, P. M. Derlet, and A. M. Läuchli

Phys. Rev. B - Accepted 1 September, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/fg74-7ssk

Abstract

Skyrmion crystals have been primarily discovered under a magnetic field for materials with non-centrosymmetric interactions. More recent developments have investigated the stability of skyrmion crystals in itinerant magnets without magnetic field. In this study, we find that a type of skyrmion crystal with two topological charges per unit cell and no magnetization at the ferromagnetic point in reciprocal space, SkX-2, is naturally stabilized in an SO(3)-symmetric model with short-range interactions realized by the Heisenberg model on the triangular lattice with scalar chirality. We complement our numerical results with a theoretical analysis that quantitatively describes the transition from the ferromagnetic ground state to the SkX-2 and the evolution of the topological charge density. Despite the constraints given by the Mermin-Wagner theorem at finite temperature, the SkX-2 can either exhibit a first-order phase transition with translation symmetry breaking, or a continuous transition to a floating solid depending on the charge density which is given by the strength of the scalar chirality interaction. Finally, the numerical results indicate the presence of ℤ2-vortices at finite temperature above the tetrahedral order in the antiferromagnetic region of our model, suggesting the existence of a vortex topological transition similar to that reported in the ordering of the pure antiferromagnetic model.

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