Skyrmions in van der Waals centrosymmetric materials with Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions

Abstract

Skyrmions can appear in non-centrosymmetric material because of the non-vanishing Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions (DMI). In this paper, we study the magnetic properties of the rhombohedral MX$_{3}$ (M: V, Cr, Mn, and Fe. X: Cl, Br, and I) van der Waals materials with centrosymmetric lattice by combining first-principles calculations and Monte Carlo simulations. We found that the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya vector acting between the second nearest neighbor sites of the intra-layer is non-zero and quite large even in MX$_{3}$ due to the breaking of the local inversion symmetry. We have found that the large DMI causes nano-scale magnetic vortexes, so-called skyrmions in MX$_{3}$. The diameter of skyrmions, e.g., in CrCl$_{3}$, is small, i.e., 2 nm, which is promising for the application of high-density magnetic memory devices. We have also found that not only conventional skyrmions in CrCl$_{3}$ and VCl$_{3}$ but also antiferromagnetic skyrmions in FeCl$_{3}$ and meron in MnCl$_{3}$ appear. Furthermore, we have found that the skyrmions in ClCl$_{3}$ and VCl$_{3}$ have a different helicity, which shows the possibility of controlling the helicity by electron/hole doping in MX$_{3}$ materials. Van der Waals materials, which have a great advantage of high degrees of freedom in structures such as heterostructures and twisted structures, exhibit high potential as skyrmion materials.