Stability of the skyrmion lattice near the critical temperature in cubic helimagnets

Abstract

The phase diagram of cubic helimagnets near the critical temperature is obtained from a Landau-Ginzburg model, including fluctuations to Gaussian level. The free energy is evaluated via a saddle-point expansion around the local minima of the Landau-Ginzburg functional. The local minima are computed by solving the Euler-Lagrange equations with appropriate boundary conditions, preserving manifestly the full nonlinearity that is characteristic of skyrmion states. It is shown that the fluctuations stabilize the skyrmion lattice in a region of the phase diagram close to the critical temperature, where it becomes the equilibrium state. A comparison of this approach with previous computations performed with a different approach (truncated Fourier expansion of magnetic states) is given.