Chiral magnets host strikingly ordered, swirling magnetic textures - such as skyrmions - that are of intense scientific interest and hold promise for future low-energy data storage and spintronic devices. These textures arise from a delicate competition between magnetic energy terms, the most important being the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI), an antisymmetric exchange interaction that emerges in materials lacking inversion symmetry. The form the DMI takes depends on the crystal symmetry of the material, and each symmetry class can stabilise different, and sometimes unexpected, magnetic configurations.
Although the DMI is central to this field, widely used open-source micromagnetic simulation tools have historically implemented only a small number of DMI forms, covering a limited set of crystal symmetries and so restricting the range of materials and phenomena that researchers can model. The New-DMI project addresses this gap by deriving and implementing the DMI terms for the remaining non-centrosymmetric crystallographic point groups, integrating them into established open-source micromagnetic calculators, and combining these capabilities with machine-learning methods to automatically explore and classify the resulting magnetic phases. The overall objective is to broaden the materials space that can be studied computationally, accelerate the discovery of novel chiral magnetic textures, and deliver these capabilities as openly available, reusable software - while training the fellow as an independent, open-science-minded researcher within the European Research Area.
