Impact of higher-order exchange on the lifetime of skyrmions and antiskyrmions

Abstract

Reliable control of skyrmion lifetime is essential for realizing spintronic devices, yet the role of higherorder exchange—which can lead to skyrmion stabilization—remains largely unexplored. Here we calculate lifetimes of isolated skyrmions and antiskyrmions at transition-metal interfaces based on an atomistic spin model that includes all fourth-order exchange terms. Within harmonic transition-state theory, we evaluate both energetic and entropic contributions and find substantially enhanced lifetimes when higher-order exchange is included. The four-spin four-site interaction raises the energy barrier and lowers the curvature of the energy landscape at the collapse saddle point, increasing the pre-exponential factor. We show that skyrmions and antiskyrmions can remain thermally stable even without Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI), and that tuning the four-spin term by a small amount modulates the prefactor over orders of magnitude. Our results identify higher-order exchange as a promising route to stabilize topological magnetic textures—in particular in systems lacking DMI—and to engineer their thermally activated decay.