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  • Letter
  • Open Access

Ultrafast optical generation of antiferromagnetic meron-antimeron pairs with conservation of topological charge

Sumit Ghosh1,2,*, Stefan Blügel1, and Yuriy Mokrousov1,2

  • 1Peter Grünberg Institut (PGI-1), Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, 52428 Jülich, Germany
  • 2Institute of Physics, Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, 55128 Mainz, Germany

  • *s.ghosh@fz-juelich.de
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Phys. Rev. Research 5, L022007 – Published 7 April, 2023

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.5.L022007

Abstract

We propose a new mechanism to produce a meron-antimeron pair in a two dimensional antiferromagnet with an ultrafast laser pulse via a thermal Schwinger mechanism. Unlike ultrafast skyrmion nucleation, this process conserves total topological charge. We systematically show different stages of the dynamics and define proper topological invariants to characterize the configurations. The emergent structure can retain its topological structure for up to 100 ps. By introducing a topological structure factor we show that pair formation is robust against any random choice of initial magnetic configuration and can survive against disorder. Our findings demonstrate that the rich world of spin textures, which goes beyond conventional skyrmions, can be reached optically.

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Phys. Rev. Research 5, L022007– Published 7 April, 2023
  • Received 8 December 2022
  • Revised 21 February 2023
  • Accepted 17 March 2023
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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