Fig. 7: Energy contributions to SkX and MS states.
From: Nano-scale collinear multi-Q states driven by higher-order interactions
Plot of the energy contributions from the exchange and three-site four-spin interaction to the total energy E(Q) for mosaic (MS) and skyrmion lattice (SkX) states for Q along the \(\overline{{{{{{{{\rm{M}}}}}}}}{{\Gamma }}{{{{{{{\rm{K}}}}}}}}}\) direction. Energies were obtained in the spin model with DFT parameters of hcp-Fe/Rh2/Ir(111). Note, that the energy contributions from the biquadratic, the four-site four-spin interaction, the DMI, and the MAE are not displayed but included in the total energy. The spikes in the energy curves for the MS states originate from changes of the local spin structure on the discrete atomic lattice due to taking only the z-component of the magnetic moments in its construction (see methods). Inset: Sketch of the 2D Brillouin zone with the three Q-vectors: Q1, Q2, and Q3 used to obtain the SkX along the \(\overline{{{\Gamma }}{{{{{{{\rm{M}}}}}}}}}\) direction; to obtain the SkX for the \(\overline{{{\Gamma }}{{{{{{{\rm{K}}}}}}}}}\) direction the Q-vectors are rotated by an angle θ = 30∘ (see methods for details).
