Lattice solutions in a Ginzburg-Landau model for a chiral magnet

Abstract

We examine micromagnetic pattern formation in chiral magnets, driven by the competition of Heisenberg exchange, Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction, easy-plane anisotropy and thermodynamic Landau potentials. Based on equivariant bifurcation theory we prove existence of lattice solutions branching off the zero magnetization state and investigate their stability. We observe in particular the stabilization of quadratic vortex-antivortex lattice configurations and instability of hexagonal skyrmion lattice configurations, and we illustrate our findings by numerical studies.