Phys.org April 25, 2022
To interface skyrmionics with electronic devices requires efficient and reliable ways of creating and destroying such excitations. An international team of researchers (Germany, USA – Flatiron Institute, Sweden) unravel the microscopic mechanism behind ultrafast skyrmion generation by femtosecond laser pulses in transition metal thin films. They employed a theoretical approach based on a two-band electronic model and showed that by exciting the itinerant electronic subsystem with a femtosecond laser ultrafast skyrmion nucleation can occur on a 100 fs timescale. By combining numerical simulations with an analytical treatment, they identified the coupling between electronic currents and the localized d-orbital spins, mediated via Rashba spin–orbit interactions among the itinerant electrons, as the microscopic and central mechanism leading to ultrafast skyrmion generation. Their results showed that an explicit treatment of itinerant electron dynamics is crucial to understand optical skyrmion generation…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Laser-induced skyrmion nucleation. Credit: npj Computational Materials volume 8, Article number: 62 (2022)Â