Phys.org October 6, 2021 Braided structures are commonly seen in nature. An international team of researchers (Germany, Sweden, China) has discovered that such structures exist on the nanoscale in alloys of iron and the metalloid germanium. These nanostrings are each made up of several skyrmions that are twisted together to a greater or lesser extent, rather like the strands of a rope. Each skyrmion itself consists of magnetic moments that point in different directions and together take the form of an elongated tiny vortex. The length of the magnetic structures is limited only by the thickness of the sample. Earlier […]
Category Archives: Skyrmions
Special heat treatment improves novel magnetic material
Science Daily March 31, 2021 Previously an international team of researchers (Germany, China) discovered that manganese silicide hosts magnetic skyrmions. Whereas Mn-Si alloy, B20 phase, is particularly suitable for the formation of skyrmion, MnSi1.7 is a contaminant. Now the team has developed a simple and efficient method to overcome this problem and prepare single‐phase MnSi films on Si substrates. It is based on the millisecond reaction between metallic Mn and Si using flash‐lamp annealing (FLA). By controlling the FLA energy density, single‐phase MnSi or MnSi1.7 or their mixture can be grown at will. Compared with bulk MnSi, the prepared MnSi […]
Skyrmions proposed as the basis for a completely new computer architecture
Phys.org December 21, 2020 Materials hosting magnetic skyrmions at room temperature could enable compact and energetically efficient storage such as racetrack memories. However, avoiding modifications of the inter-skyrmion distances remains challenging. An international team of researchers (Switzerland, Greece, Austria, Italy) has demonstrated that a hybrid ferro/ferri/ferromagnetic multilayer system can host two distinct skyrmion phases at room temperature, namely tubular and partial skyrmions. Furthermore, the tubular skyrmion can be converted into a partial skyrmion. Such systems may serve as a platform for designing memory applications using distinct skyrmion types…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Magnetic whirls in future data storage devices
Eurekalert March 3, 2020 Researchers in Germany discovered that skyrmions and antiskyrmions are stabilized in different materials by a magnetic interaction that is directly tied to the structure of the host material. However, what was previously overlooked is that the magnetic dipoles also significantly interact with each other via their dipole-dipole interaction. This interaction always prefers skyrmions. For this reason, even “antiskyrmion materials” can exhibit skyrmions (but not vice versa). This happens preferably as the temperature is lowered. At a critical transition temperature, the two distinct objects coexist. The finding allows for an advanced version of the racetrack memory data […]
Skyrmions like it hot: Spin structures are controllable even at high temperatures
Nanowerk February 13, 2020 When a skyrmion is driven by an electric current it propagates at skyrmion Hall angle (SkHA). This drive dependence, as well as thermal effects due to Joule heating, could be used to tailor skyrmion trajectories, but are not well understood. An international team of researchers (Germany, Belgium, USA – MIT, Czech Republic) had previously demonstrated the use of new spin structures for future magnetic storage devices. In their new research they report skyrmion dynamics as a function of temperature and drive amplitude. They found the skyrmion velocity depends strongly on temperature, while the skyrmion Hall angle […]
The first high-speed straight motion of magnetic skyrmions at room temperature demonstrated
Phys.org November 19, 2019 The magnetic skyrmion can be driven by low current density and has a potential to be stabilized in nanoscale offering new directions of spintronics. However, there remain some fundamental issues in widely studied ferromagnetic systems which include a difficulty to realize stable ultra-small skyrmions at room temperature, presence of the skyrmion Hall effect, and limitation of velocity owing to the topological charge. Researchers in Japan have shown that skyrmion bubbles in a synthetic antiferromagnetic coupled multilayer are free from the above issues. Additive Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction and spin-orbit torque (SOT) of the tailored stack allow stable skyrmion […]
A step towards probabilistic computing (w/video)
Eurekalert May 14, 2019 In the search for new computer concepts, research is concentrating, amongst others, on probability-based computing. Researchers in Germany have succeeded in developing a material in which skyrmions can form. The researchers have also developed a method to exploit thermal diffusion of skyrmions in what is referred to as a reshuffler, a component of probability-based computing that automatically scrambles input data. The reshuffler produces a sequence with the same number of memory units but in a different order. Their probability has therefore remained the same. They have shown according to which laws diffusion occurs, its length and […]
Skyrmions could provide next generation data storage
Science Daily April 1, 2019 Reconfigurable, ordered matter offers great potential for future low-power computer memory by storing information in energetically stable configurations. An international team of researchers (UK, USA – University of Colorado) describe stable, high-degree multi-skyrmion configurations where an arbitrary number of antiskyrmions are contained within a larger skyrmion called skyrmion bags. They have demonstrated the concept experimentally and numerically in liquid crystals and numerically in micromagnetic simulations either without or with magnetostatic effects. They found the skyrmion bags to act like single skyrmions in pairwise interaction and under the influence of current in magnetic materials. The finding […]
Taking magnetism for a spin: exploring the mysteries of skyrmions
Nanowerk January 23, 2019 Until recently skyrmions were a phenomenon only observed at extreme low temperature. They need external magnetic fields to exist. A team of researchers in the US (Ames Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, University of Florida) established a skyrmion lattice in a sample through exposure to magnetic fields and supercooling with liquid nitrogen. They were able to observe the skyrmion lattice in zero magnetic field, and then observe the decay of the skyrmions as the temperature warmed gaining critical new information about how skyrmions behave and how they revert to metastable state. The research provides a very solid […]
Controllable fast, tiny magnetic bits
Phys.org January 4, 2019 Researchers at MIT present an analytical theory to describe three-dimensional magnetic textures in perpendicularly magnetized magnetic multilayers that arise in the presence of magnetostatic interactions and the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI). They demonstrated that domain walls in multilayers develop a complex twisted structure, which persists even for films with strong DMI. The origin of this twist is surface-volume stray field interactions that manifest as a depth-dependent effective field whose form mimics the DMI effective field. They found that the wall twist has a minor impact on the equilibrium skyrmion or domain size but can significantly affect current-driven […]