EUROPEAN CONGRESS AND EXHIBITION ON ADVANCED MATERIALS AND PROCESSES - EUROMAT 2021

During the last decade, the spin-orbit interaction has played an increasingly crucial role in condensed matter physics, thanks to its relevance as a rich microscopic mechanism from the fundamental point of view and as a driving force for innovative spintronic applications on the technological side. Combined with the global thrust towards miniaturization and with the ubiquitous research in two-dimensional (2D) materials, the talk will focus on the modelling of ferromagnets towards the 2D limit. In particular, after a general overview on spin-orbit coupling (SOC), I will focus on the role of spin-orbit coupling in the magnetic properties of layered Nickel halides. In closer detail, the anisotropic exchange (often neglected in the literature) turns out to be relevant, when describing the magnetism of 2D-iodide, emphasizing the importance of relativistic effects related to the non-magnetic anion. Our predictions suggest a particularly rich phase diagram for Ni halides monolayers: a spontaneous antiskyrmion lattice with unique topology and chirality of the spin structure is driven by SOC-induced anisotropic exchange coupling. The latter is therefore put forward as a novel, alternative and robust mechanism that can give rise to topologically non-trivial spin configurations even in centrosymmetric systems.