Skyrmion crystal phases in antiferromagnetic itinerant triangular magnets

Very often the skyrmions form a triangular crystal in chiral magnets. Here we study the effect of itinerant electrons on the structure of skyrmion crystal (SkX) on triangular lattice using Kondo lattice model in the large coupling limit and treating the localized spins as classical vectors. To simulate the system, we employ hybrid Markov Chain Monte Carlo method (hMCMC) which includes electron diagonalization in each MCMC update for classical spins. We present the low temperature results for $12\times 12$ system at electron density $n=1/3$ which show a sudden jump in skyrmion number when we increase the hopping strength of the itinerant electrons. We find that this high skyrmion number SkX phase is stabilized by combined effects: lowering of density of states at electron filling $n=1/3$ and also pushing the bottom energy states further down. We show that these results hold for larger system using travelling cluster variation of hMCMC. We expect that itinerant triangular magnets might exhibit the possible transition between low density to high density SkX phases by applying external pressure.

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