Journal Article

Engineering chiral and topological orbital magnetism of domain walls and skyrmions

Blügel, Stefan, Freimuth, Frank, Mokrousov, Yuriy, Lux, Fabian R.

2018

Overview

Electrons that are slowly moving through chiral magnetic textures can effectively be described as if they were influenced by electromagnetic fields emerging from the real-space topology. This adiabatic viewpoint has been very successful in predicting physical properties of chiral magnets. Here, based on a rigorous quantum-mechanical approach, we unravel the emergence of chiral and topological orbital magnetism in one- and two-dimensional spin systems. We uncover that the quantized orbital magnetism in the adiabatic limit can be understood as a Landau-Peierls response to the emergent magnetic field. Our central result is that the spin–orbit interaction in interfacial skyrmions and domain walls can be used to tune the orbital magnetism over orders of magnitude by merging the real-space topology with the topology in reciprocal space. Our findings point out the route to experimental engineering of orbital properties of chiral spin systems, thereby paving the way to the field of chiral orbitronics. Electronic properties of domain walls and skyrmions are often discussed in the language of emergent fields. The authors theoretically investigate its applicability and the promises which lie beyond, revealing the unique fingerprints of chiral magnetic textures in the orbital magnetism.

• Publisher: Nature Publishing Group UK,Nature Publishing Group
• Subject: 639/766/119/1001 / 639/766/119/997 / Adiabatic flow / Domain walls / Electromagnetic fields / Electronic properties / Hypothetical particles / Magnetic properties / Magnetism / Magnets / Particle theory / Physical properties / Physics / Physics and Astronomy / Topology