2017/10/30 by Yoshihiko Nishikawa, Koji Hukushima, Werner Krauth · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.stat-mech #cond-mat.str-el
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevb.99.064435
published as Phys. Rev. B 99, 064435 (2019) · 8 pages, 6 figures
arxiv created 2017/10/30 · arxiv updated 2019/04/26
We study the melting of skyrmions in a two-dimensional Heisenberg chiral magnet with bi-axial Dzyaloshinskii--Moriya interactions. These topological excitations may form at zero temperature a triangular crystal with long-range positional order. However, we show using large-scale Monte Carlo simulations that at small finite temperature, the skyrmions rather form a typical two-dimensional solid: Positional correlations decay with distance as power laws while the orientational correlations remain finite. At higher temperature, we observe a direct transition from this two-dimensional solid to a liquid with short-range correlations. This differs from generic two-dimensional homogeneous particle systems, where a hexatic phase is realized between the solid and the liquid.