Emergent chiral spin textures in centrosymmetric iron garnet with spin alignment constraints

Abstract

Chiral spin textures have emerged as a captivating class of topological matter. These intriguing structures harbor localized and topologically protected magnetic textures, rendering them promising candidates for novel spintronic applications. Here, the emergent chiral spin textures in an iron garnet with nanodisk configuration have been micromagnatically simulated based on the Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert equation (LLG) of COMSOL Multiphysics. The modification of magnetic spin texture in the considered iron garnet has been controlled by introducing the interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (I-DMI) and spin alignment constraints as locally pinned spins and curvilinear defects at edges. These boundary conditions induced interesting chiral textures not commonly observed in such iron garnet due to its centrosymmetric crystal structure. The simulation results showed the presence of two distinct regions of spin texture: inside and outside the pinning boundary. By systematically varying the DMI strength (D) with the size of the pinning boundary (Rpin) and the number of defects (Ndef), the emerging chiral spin textures have been explored and reported, including the existence of ramified helical stripes, skyrmions, and skyrmions-like textures such as elongated skyrmions, chiral horseshoe domains, biskyrmions and target skyrmions (TSk) (2π-TSk and 3π-TSk). Also, it has been reported that various collapses occur in the final spin texture states, leading to the transition from one state to another when varying the values of Rpin and Ndef with D.