Designer Magnetic Textures by Strain Engineering Van der Waals Magnets

Two-dimensional magnets provide a new playground for strain engineering of magnetism. In this work, we discover that novel magnetic textures emerge in two-dimensional magnets, induced by periodic strain patterning. By imposing a strain field in a square lattice geometry, meron-like and antimeron-like topological magnetic texture emerges due to periodic modulation of magnetic anisotropy locked onto the strain field. We show that the stability of topological magnetic textures relative to non-topological bubble-like magnetic texture can be easily controlled by the strain field profile. Furthermore, the topological magnetic texture and their fundamental excitations can be mapped to an effective spin Hamiltonian, where the strength of four-spin interaction is comparable to nearest and second-nearest two-spin exchange coupling. As non-uniform strain patterning has been achieved by controlled synthesis and substrate engineering of two-dimensional materials, our work demonstrates the possibility of creating topological magnetic textures with strain and designing higher-order spin Hamiltonians on demand.