Traditionally, skyrmions are treated as continuum magnetic textures of classical spins with a well-defined topological skyrmion number. Owing to their topological protection, skyrmions have attracted great interest as building blocks in future memory technology. Smaller skyrmions offer greater memory density; however, quantum effects are not negligible for skyrmions with sizes of just a few lattice constants. In this paper we study quantum fluctuations around dense skyrmion crystal ground states, and focus on the utility of a discretized order parameter for quantum skyrmions. The order parameter is found to be a useful indicator of the existence of quantum skyrmions, and captures the quantum phase transition between two distinct skyrmion phases.

中文翻译：

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量子斯格明子晶体有序参数中的量子涨落

传统上，斯格明子被视为具有明确定义的拓扑斯格明子数的经典自旋的连续磁纹理。由于其拓扑保护，skyrmions 作为未来存储技术的构建块引起了极大的兴趣。更小的skyrmions提供更大的内存密度；然而，对于只有几个晶格常数的斯格明子来说，量子效应是不可忽略的。在本文中，我们研究了密集斯格明子晶体基态周围的量子涨落，并专注于量子斯格明子离散有序参数的效用。发现有序参数是量子斯格明子存在的有用指标，并捕获了两个不同斯格明子相之间的量子相变。