Bound States of Skyrmions and Merons near the Lifshitz Point.

We study topological defects in anisotropic ferromagnets with competing interactions near the Lifshitz point. We show that Skyrmions and bimerons are stable in a large part of the phase diagram. We calculate Skyrmion-Skyrmion and meron-meron interactions and show that Skyrmions attract each other and form ring-shaped bound states in a zero magnetic field. At the Lifshitz point merons carrying a fractional topological charge become deconfined. These results imply that unusual topological excitations may exist in weakly frustrated magnets with conventional crystal lattices.

The amplitudes and the structure of the charge density wave in YBCO.

We find unknown s- and d-wave amplitudes of the recently discovered charge density wave (CDW) in underdoped cuprates. To do so we perform a combined analysis of experimental data for ortho-II YBa2Cu3Oy. The analysis includes data on nuclear magnetic resonance, resonant inelastic X-ray scattering, and hard X-ray diffraction. The amplitude of doping modulation found in our analysis is 3.5 · 10-3 in a low magnetic field and T = 60 K, the amplitude is 6.5 · 10-3 in a magnetic field of 30T and T = 1.3 K. The values are in units of elementary charge per unit cell of a CuO2 plane. We show that the data rule out a checkerboard pattern, and we also show that the data might rule out mechanisms of the CDW which do not include phonons.