2020/12/17 by Rodrigo Jaeschke‐Ubiergo, Rodrigo Jaeschke-Ubiergo, Eric Suárez Morell +3
Materials Science · Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #2D Materials and Applications #Advanced Condensed Matter Physics #Combinatorics #Condensed matter physics #Ferromagnetism #Lattice (music) #Magnetism #Mathematics #Physics #Quantum mechanics #Skyrmion #Topological Materials and Phenomena #Topology (electrical circuits) #cond-mat.mes-hall #cond-mat.mtrl-sci #van der Waals force
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevb.103.174410
published as Phys. Rev. B 103, 174410 (2021) · Submitted to Physical Review B. 13 pages and 7 figures; Added references in section II.C
arxiv created 2020/12/17 · openalex created_date 2020/12/21 · openalex publication_date 2021/05/10 · arxiv updated 2021/05/19 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We study the microscopical origin of anisotropic ferromagnetism in the van der Waals magnet CrI3. We conclude that the nearest-neighbor exchange is well described by the Heisenberg-Kitaev-\mathrm\ensuremathΓ (HK\mathrm\ensuremathΓ) model, and we also find a nonzero Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI) on next-nearest neighbors. Both Kitaev and DMI are known to generate a nontrivial topology of the magnons in the honeycomb lattice and have been used separately to describe the low-energy regime of this material. We discuss how including one or the other leads to different signs of the Chern number. Furthermore, the topological gap at the \mathbitK point seems to be mainly produced by the DMI, despite its being one order of magnitude smaller than Kitaev. Finally, we show that, by applying an external electric field perpendicular to the crystal plane, it is possible to induce DMI on nearest neighbors, and this could have consequences in noncollinear spin textures, such as domain walls and skyrmions.