2016/09/23 by Manuel dos Santos Dias, Juba Bouaziz, Mohammed Bouhassoune +2 · 65 citations
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Condensed matter physics #Magnetic and transport properties of perovskites and related materials #Magnetic anisotropy #Magnetic field #Magnetic moment #Magnetic properties of thin films #Magnetism #Magnetization #Orbital magnetization #Physics #Quantum mechanics #Skyrmion #Topological Materials and Phenomena #Topology (electrical circuits) #cond-mat.mes-hall
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/ncomms13613
published in Nature Communications 7(1), 13613 (Nature Portfolio) · 17 pages, 5 figures, to be published in Nature Communications
arxiv created 2016/09/23 · openalex publication_date 2016/12/20 · arxiv updated 2016/12/23 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
When electrons are driven through unconventional magnetic structures, such as skyrmions, they experience emergent electromagnetic fields that originate several Hall effects. Independently, ground-state emergent magnetic fields can also lead to orbital magnetism, even without the spin-orbit interaction. The close parallel between the geometric theories of the Hall effects and of the orbital magnetization raises the question: does a skyrmion display topological orbital magnetism? Here we first address the smallest systems with nonvanishing emergent magnetic field, trimers, characterizing the orbital magnetic properties from first-principles. Armed with this understanding, we study the orbital magnetism of skyrmions and demonstrate that the contribution driven by the emergent magnetic field is topological. This means that the topological contribution to the orbital moment does not change under continuous deformations of the magnetic structure. Furthermore, we use it to propose a new experimental protocol for the identification of topological magnetic structures, by soft X-ray spectroscopy.