From Werner KRAUTH

Y. Nishikawa, K. Hukushima, W. Krauth Solid-liquid transition of skyrmions in a two-dimensional chiral magnet arXiv:1710.11095 Physical Review B 99 064435 (2019)

Paper

Abstract We study the melting of skyrmions in a two-dimensional Heisenberg chiral magnet with bi-axial Dzyaloshinskii--Moriya interactions. These topological excitations may form at zero temperature a triangular crystal with long-range positional order. However, we show using large-scale Monte Carlo simulations that at small finite temperature, the skyrmions rather form a typical two-dimensional solid: Positional correlations decay with distance as power laws while the orientational correlations remain finite. At higher temperature, we observe a direct transition from this two-dimensional solid to a liquid with short-range correlations. This differs from generic two-dimensional homogeneous particle systems, where a hexatic phase is realized between the solid and the liquid.

DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevB.99.064435

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