Phase transition threshold and stability of magnetic skyrmions

Abstract

We examine the stability of vortex-like configuration of magnetization in magnetic materials, so-called the magnetic skyrmion. These correspond to critical points of the Landau-Lifshitz energy with the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) interactions. In an earlier work of the D\"oring and Melcher, it is known that the skyrmion is a ground state when the coefficient of the DM term is small. In this paper, we prove that there is an explicit critical value of the coefficient above which the skyrmion is unstable, while stable below this threshold. Moreover, we show that in the unstable regime, the infimum of energy is not bounded below, by giving an explicit counterexample with a sort of helical configuration. This mathematically explains the occurrence of phase transition observed in some experiments.