Energy minimization for skyrmions on planar thin films

Abstract

We consider an energy functional that arises in micromagnetic and liquid crystal theory on thin films. In particular, our energy comprises a non-convex term that models anti-symmetric exchange as well as an anisotropy term. We devise an algorithm for energy minimization in the continuous case and show weak convergence of a subsequence towards a solution of the corresponding Euler--Lagrange equation. Furthermore, an algorithm for numerical energy minimization is presented. We show empirically that this numerical algorithm converges to the correct solutions for a benchmark problem without the need for user-supplied parameters, and present a rigorous convergence analysis for important special cases.