Open Access

Ádám Butykai, Sándor Bordács, László F. Kiss, Bertalan György Szigeti, Vladimir Tsurkan, Alois Loidl, István Kézsmárki

• We report on the slow magnetization dynamics observed upon the magnetic phase transitions of GaV4S8, a multiferroic compound featuring a long-ranged cycloidal magnetic order and a Néel-type skyrmion lattice in a relatively broad temperature range below its Curie temperature. The fundamental difference between GaV4S8 and the chiral helimagnets, the prototypical skyrmion host compounds, lies within the polar symmetry of GaV4S8, promoting a cycloidal instead of a helical magnetic order and rendering the magnetic phase diagram essentially different from that in the cubic helimagnets. Our ac magnetic susceptibility study reveals slow relaxation dynamics at the field-driven phase transitions between the cycloidal, skyrmion lattice and field-polarized states. At each phase boundary, the characteristic relaxation times were found to exhibit a strong temperature dependence, starting from the minute range at low temperatures, decreasing to the micro- to millisecond range at higher temperatures.