Skip to main content

SCIENTIFIC HIGHLIGHTS

Curved Magnetism in CrI3
10 June 2022
Curved magnets attract considerable interest for their unusually rich phase diagram, often encompassing exotic (e.g., topological or chiral) spin states. Micromagnetic simulations are playing a central role in the theoretical understanding of such phenomena; their predictive power, however, rests on the availability of reliable model parameters to describe a given material or nanostructure. Here we demonstrate how noncollinear-spin polarized density-functional theory can be used to determine the flexomagnetic coupling coefficients in real systems.
By focusing on monolayer CrI3, we find a crossover as a function of curvature between a magnetization normal to the surface to a cycloidal state, which we rationalize in terms of effective anisotropy and Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya contributions to the magnetic energy. Our results reveal an unexpectedly large impact of spin-orbit interactions on the curvature-induced anisotropy, which we discuss in the context of existing phenomenological models.
Hits: 1305
Sustainable energy conversion & storage systems

Curved Magnetism in CrI3


Alexander Edström, Danila Amoroso, Silvia Picozzi, Paolo Barone, and Massimiliano Stengel

Phys. Rev. Lett. 128, 177202 – Published 28 April 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.128.177202