Magnetism and Néel skyrmion dynamics in GaV4S8−ySey
Phys. Rev. Research 2, 032001(R) (2020)
A team of researchers from the United Kingdom and Slovenia has published a paper in Physical Review Research as a Rapid Communication. The paper co-authored by Matjaž Gomilšek explores the influence of low levels of chemical substitution on the magnetism in GaV4S8−ySey.
The authors show that these materials exhibit skyrmion lattices (exotic topological spin textures) at elevated temperatures by studying their dynamics via muon spin relaxation (μSR). They also find that chemical substitution stabilizes additional skyrmionic precursor states that persist down to even lower temperatures. Finally, at the lowest temperatures the authors discover a gradual crossover from cycloidal order to a ferromagnetic ground state in both the y = 0 and the y = 0.1 materials, and reveal that chemical substitution leads to an inhomogeneous spin density in this series of materials. The discovered rich phase diagram and non-trivial substitutional effects make GaV4S8−ySey an especially interesting series of topological magnets.
