Continuum of metastable helical states of monoaxial chiral magnets: Effect of boundary conditions

Abstract

In a recent publication, we showed that a monoaxial chiral magnet has a continuum of metastable helical states differing by the helix wave number. This intriguing result was obtained for the case of an infinite magnet (or a magnet with periodic boundary conditions). However, it has been pointed out that in a real magnet only one of these states is compatible with the boundary conditions, because the helix wave number is determined by the surface chiral twist. Thus, only one of the continuum of states is physically realizable. This is true for the case of a chiral magnet in contact with a nonmagnetic medium (vacuum or air, for instance), but the boundary conditions can be altered by setting the chiral magnet in contact with another magnetic medium, which may be able to absorb the surface chiral twist. We show here that this is indeed the case by studying a composite magnet system, which consists of one monoaxial chiral magnet of rectangular parallelepiped shape which has two similar slabs of a uniaxial ferromagnet attached to each of the faces that are perpendicular to the chiral axis. We show that, in the case of zero applied field, this composite system has a number of metastable helical states that are proportional to the length L0 of the chiral magnet along the chiral axis, and that the results of our previous publication are recovered in the limit L0 → ∞.