Topologically protected magnetic "whirls" such as skyrmions in antiferromagnetic materials have recently attracted extensive interest due to their nontrivial band topology and potential application in antiferromagnetic spintronics. However, room-temperature skyrmions in natural metallic antiferromagnetic materials with merit of probable convenient electrical manipulation have not been reported. Here, room-temperature skyrmions are realized in a non-collinear antiferromagnet, Mn3 Sn, capped with a Pt overlayer. The evolution of spin textures from coplanar inverted triangular structures to Bloch-type skyrmions is achieved via tuning the magnitude of interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction. Beyond that, the temperature can induce an unconventional transition from skyrmions to antiferromagnetic meron-like spin textures at ≈220 K in the Mn3 Sn/Pt samples. Combining with the theoretical calculations, it is found that the transition originates from the temperature dependence of antiferromagnetic exchange interaction between kagome sublayers within the Mn3 Sn crystalline unit-cell. These findings open the avenue for the development of topological spin-swirling-based antiferromagnetic spintronics.
Keywords: Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions; non-collinear antiferromagnets; skyrmions; topological spin textures.
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