Haoxin’s paper was published in Nature Physics today! Congratulations to all coauthors!
Skyrmion solids
When an electron gas is completely spin polarized, adding charge to the system necessarily involves changing the total spin—in a strongly interacting system, the new charges can have intricate spin textures known as skyrmions, in which the spin winds itself in a patter resembling a vortex. In this paper, Haoxin and collaborators used decay of charge neutral spin waves to find that these skyrmions can freeze into a solid, forming an absorbtive medium for the spin waves.