Skyrmions and the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya Interaction

Abstract

Chiral magnets support topologically stable spin structures that are known as magnetic skyrmions, first discovered in 2009. One of the mechanisms responsible for the formation of a skyrmion relies on the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) interaction induced by a lack of inversion symmetry and strong spin-orbit coupling of the compound. We investigate the strength of the DM interaction in a microscopic toy model: the Rashba model coupled to a helical exchange field. We check previously-established analytical results for small Rashba couplings and use a numerical method to find the DM interaction for large Rashba couplings.