Room-temperature chiral magnetic skyrmions in ultrathin magnetic nanostructures.

By Olivier Boulle, J. Vogel, Hongxin Yang, S. Pizzini, Dayane de Souza Chaves, A. Locatelli, T. Menteş, A. Sala, L. Buda-Prejbeanu, O. Klein and 10 more. Nature Nanotechnology, 2016

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Magnetic skyrmions are chiral spin structures with a whirling configuration. Their topological properties, nanometre size and the fact that they can be moved by small current densities have opened a new paradigm for the manipulation of magnetization at the nanoscale. Chiral skyrmion structures have so far been experimentally demonstrated only in bulk materials and in epitaxial ultrathin films, and under an external magnetic field or at low temperature. Here, we report on the observation of stable skyrmions in sputtered ultrathin Pt/Co/MgO nanostructures at room temperature and zero external magnetic field. We use high lateral resolution X-ray magnetic circular dichroism microscopy to image their chiral Néel internal structure, which we explain as due to the large strength of the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction as revealed by spin wave spectroscopy measurements. Our results are substantiated by micromagnetic simulations and numerical models, which allow the identification of the physical mechanisms governing the size and stability of the skyrmions.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Condensed Matter Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3b515a08acd67920ffb38801ee9985cd3679d48e

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Citations in the corpus

Skyrmion-electronics: writing, deleting, reading and processing magnetic skyrmions toward spintronic applications (2019, methodology): “In the same year, Boulle et al observed room-temperature skyrmions in sputtered ultrathin Pt/Co/MgO multilayers by using the photoemission electron microscopy combined with XMCD-PEEM [120], which identified the Néel-type nature of the skyrmion chirality.”
The 2017 Magnetism Roadmap (2017, methodology): “Transmission electron microscopy with Lorentz imaging (Lorentz-TEM) of magnetic order [6], magnetic force microscopy (MFM) [7], secondary electron microscopy with polarization analysis (SEMPA) [8], photoemission electron microscopy (PEEM) [9], spin-polarized scanning tunneling microscopy (spin-STM) ”
Skyrmion Hall effect revealed by direct time-resolved X-ray microscopy (2016, background): “One of the most interesting spin structures that originates from this type of material is the magnetic skyrmion.(3,4,10,11) This topologically non-trivial, particle-like structure exhibits very interesting properties, such as topological stabilization and predicted efficient current-induced motion.”
Tunable room-temperature magnetic skyrmions in Ir/Fe/Co/Pt multilayers. (2016, positive): “In contrast to known multilayer skyrmion hosts 20–22 , Ir/Fe/Co/Pt stacks include an additional FM layer (Fe).”