Formation and growth of skyrmion crystal phase in a frustrated Heisenberg antiferromagnet with Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction

Abstract

We study the formation and growth of a skyrmion crystal (SkX) phase in a frustrated antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model on a triangular lattice with Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI) in the presence of an external magnetic field. We build phase diagrams in the temperature-field parameter plane, featuring first-order phase transitions and tricritical points, and study their evolution with the increasing DMI strength. It is found that already relatively small DMI intensity can lead to the appearance of the SkX phase at low temperatures in the vicinity of the meeting point of the remaining helical, coplanar up-up-down, and canted V-like ordered phases. By means of a parallel tempering (PT) Monte Carlo algorithm we find that the minimum value of DMI, at which the skyrmion phase emerges, Dt≈0.02, is one order of magnitude smaller than previously reported. We demonstrate the efficiency of PT in reliable and precise location of the phase boundaries between different phases separated by either very large (strong first-order transition) or barely detectable energy barriers, where the standard Monte Carlo approach may easily fail to find a stable solution.