Extended saddle points govern long-lived antiskyrmions

Abstract

Achieving long-lived nanoscale magnetic solitons remains a central challenge, as their lifetimes typically decrease rapidly with temperature. Here, we demonstrate that anisotropic Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (aDMI) enables spatially extended saddle points (SPs) that fundamentally alter thermally activated decay. In contrast to conventional localized SPs, these extended configurations completely suppress the entropic contribution to the activation rate, rendering the lifetimes effectively temperature independent. To establish this mechanism, we develop a first-principles method based on spin spirals to compute DMI beyond the isotropic approximation, resolving its full directional dependence for arbitrary nearest neighbors. We apply this method to oxidized Fe$_3$GeTe$_2$ (FGT-O), an experimentally accessible van der Waals magnet. Oxygen adsorption simultaneously breaks inversion symmetry and lowers the in-plane crystalline symmetry, thereby generating a sizable aDMI. We demonstrate that aDMI stabilizes nanoscale antiskyrmions with energy barriers exceeding 120 meV at low external magnetic fields. Crucially, extended SPs enhance the lifetime in FGT-O by more than five orders of magnitude at room temperature compared to conventional ultrathin-film skyrmion systems. We further show that aDMI is not the only route to such extended SPs and identify the general conditions under which they emerge, establishing a general route to soliton decay pathways with temperature-independent prefactors. Our results uncover a new paradigm for enhancing soliton stability through transition-state geometry rather than energy-barrier height.