arXiv2022
The development of the quantum skyrmion concept is aimed at expanding the scope of the fundamental research and practical applications for classical topologically-protected magnetic textures, and potentially paves the way for creating new quantum technologies. Undoubtedly, this calls for establishing a connection between a classical skyrmion and its quantum counterpart: a skyrmion wave function is an intrinsically more complex object than a non-collinear configuration of classical spins representing the classical skyrmion. Up to date, such a quantum-classical relation was only established on the level of different physical observables, but not for classical and quantum states per se. In this work, we show that the classical skyrmion spin order can be reconstructed using only the low-energy part of the spectrum of the corresponding quantum spin Hamiltonian. This can be done by means of a flexible symmetry-free numerical realization of Anderson's idea of the towers of states (TOS) that allows one to study known, as well as unknown, classical spin configurations with a proper choice of the loss function. We show that the existence of the TOS in the spectrum of the quantum systems does not guarantee a priori that the classical skyrmion magnetization profile can be obtained as an outcome of the actual measurement. This procedure should be complemented by a proper decoherence mechanism due to the interaction with the environment. The later selects a specific combination of the TOS eigenfunctions before the measurement and, thus, ensures the transition from a highly-entangled quantum skyrmionic state to a classical non-collinear magnetic order that is measured in real experiments. The results obtained in the context of skyrmions allow us to take a fresh look at the problem of quantum antiferromagnetism.