Skyrmion crystal phases in Kondo lattice model on triangular lattices

Abstract

Abstract Very often the magnetic skyrmions (topologically protected spin textures) form a triangular crystal in chiral magnets. Here we study the effect of itinerant electrons on the structure of skyrmion crystal (SkX) on triangular lattice using Kondo lattice model in the large coupling limit and treating the localized spins as classical vectors. To simulate the system, we employ hybrid Markov Chain Monte Carlo method (hMCMC) which includes electron diagonalization in each MCMC update for classical spins. We present the low-temperature results for 12 × 12 system at electron density n = 1 / 3 which show a sudden jump in skyrmion number reducing the size of the skyrmions when we increase the hopping strength of the itinerant electrons. We find that this high skyrmion number SkX phase is stabilized by a combined effect: lowering of density of states at electron filling n = 1 / 3 and also pushing the bottom energy states further down. We show that these results hold for larger 24 × 24 system using traveling cluster variation of hMCMC. We expect that itinerant triangular magnets might exhibit the possible transition between low-density to high-density SkX phases by applying external pressure.