TY  - JOUR
AU  - dos Santos Dias, Manuel
AU  - Bouaziz, Juba
AU  - Bouhassoune, Mohammed
AU  - Blügel, Stefan
AU  - Lounis, Samir
TI  - Chirality-driven orbital magnetic moments as a new probe for topological magnetic structures
JO  - Nature Communications
VL  - 7
SN  - 2041-1723
CY  - London
PB  - Nature Publishing Group
M1  - FZJ-2016-07879
SP  - 13613
PY  - 2016
AB  - When electrons are driven through unconventional magnetic structures, such as skyrmions, they experience emergent electromagnetic fields that originate several Hall effects. Independently, ground-state emergent magnetic fields can also lead to orbital magnetism, even without the spin–orbit interaction. The close parallel between the geometric theories of the Hall effects and of the orbital magnetization raises the question: does a skyrmion display topological orbital magnetism? Here we first address the smallest systems with nonvanishing emergent magnetic field, trimers, characterizing the orbital magnetic properties from first-principles. Armed with this understanding, we study the orbital magnetism of skyrmions and demonstrate that the contribution driven by the emergent magnetic field is topological. This means that the topological contribution to the orbital moment does not change under continuous deformations of the magnetic structure. Furthermore, we use it to propose a new experimental protocol for the identification of topological magnetic structures, by soft X-ray spectroscopy.
LB  - PUB:(DE-HGF)16
UR  - <Go to ISI:>//WOS:000390050100001
C6  - pmid:27995909
DO  - DOI:10.1038/ncomms13613
UR  - https://juser.fz-juelich.de/record/825416
ER  -