Skyrmions, Electrons, and Light in van der Waals materials and optical cavities

Devices based on magnetism offer avenues for sustainable technology.

A recently discovered platform for novel magnetic states is van der Waals materials (vdWm), where competing anisotropy, quantum fluctuations, and spin-orbit effects can induce edge magnons, skyrmions, and spin liquids.

To exploit vdWm requires to understand the interplay of electronic and magnetic structures, and to manipulate phases with topological excitations, e.g. skyrmions.

Since vdWm functionalities depend on the relative alignment of the vdWm layers and laser driving (Moiré and optical engineering), we will investigate how these and optical cavities influence skyrmions in vdWm.

For this, we will introduce a new mixed quantum-classical and microscopic description where electrons, localized spins and light are all explicitly treated, and the microscopic system’s parameters are extracted from first principle calculations.

Fully quantum calculations for small skyrmions will also be performed, as conceptual benchmarks and for a quantum thermodynamics perspective.

Our expectation is that the explicit inclusion of electronic degrees of freedom will have important, if not crucial, consequences on skyrmion behavior in vdWm and in cavities.

An important outcome of our work will be the discovery of possible protocols to manipulate exotic electronic and magnetic (skyrmionic) phases in vdWm, to interpret experiments (as those at ESS and MAXIV) and computationally discover new states of magnetic matter.