Slim Ibrahim: Phase Transition threshold and stability of magnetic skyrmions

Date: 2023-10-24

Time: 14:00 - 15:00

Spekaer

Slim Ibrahim, University of Victoria

Abstract

After a very brief intro to chiral magnets, I will examine the stability of vortex-like configurations known as magnetic skyrmions. These correspond to critical points of the Landau-Lifshitz energy with the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) interactions. From an earlier work of Doring and Melcher, it is known that the skyrmion is a ground state when the coefficient of the DM term is small. In my talk, I will quantify  an explicit critical threshold of that coefficient above which the skyrmion becomes unstable, while stable below it. In addition, in the unstable regime, I will show how the infimum of energy is not bounded from below, by giving an explicit counterexample with a sort of helical-shape configuration. This mathematically explains the occurrence of phase transition observed in some experiments. This is a joint work with I. Shimizu (Osaka, U.)