Unlocking the recipe for designer magnetic particles for next generation computing technologies

Recently ensembles of chiral spin textures, consisting of skyrmions and magnetic stripes, are shown to possess rich interactions with potential for device applications. However, several fundamental aspects of chiral spin texture phenomenology remain to be elucidated, including their domain wall (DW) structure, thermodynamic stability, and morphological transitions. An international team of researchers (Singapore, USA – Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) has shown the evolution of these textural characteristics unveiled on a tunable multilayer platform using a combination of full-field electron and soft X-ray microscopies with numerical simulations. They demonstrated the increasing chiral interactions, the emergence of Néel helicity, followed by a marked reduction in domain compressibility, and finally a transformation in the skyrmion formation mechanism. According to the researchers together with an analytical model, these experiments establish a comprehensive microscopic framework for investigating and tailoring chiral spin texture character in multilayer films…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE  Open Access 1   ,  2