Magnetic skyrmion logic gates: conversion, duplication and merging of skyrmions

By Xichao Zhang, M. Ezawa, Yan Zhou. Scientific Reports, 2014

764 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Magnetic skyrmions, which are topological particle-like excitations in ferromagnets, have attracted a lot of attention recently. Skyrmionics is an attempt to use magnetic skyrmions as information carriers in next generation spintronic devices. Proposals of manipulations and operations of skyrmions are highly desired. Here, we show that the conversion, duplication and merging of isolated skyrmions with different chirality and topology are possible all in one system. We also demonstrate the conversion of a skyrmion into another form of a skyrmion, i.e., a bimeron. We design spin logic gates such as the AND and OR gates based on manipulations of skyrmions. These results provide important guidelines for utilizing the topology of nanoscale spin textures as information carriers in novel magnetic sensors and spin logic devices.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/435f58b0c3764f97ab5318811d9570dccb6449f8

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

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Citations in the corpus

Room-temperature chiral magnetic skyrmions in ultrathin magnetic nanostructures. (2016, background): “An additional important feature is that skyrmions can be manipulated by in-plane currents [11–14] which has led to novel concepts of non-volatile magnetic memories [7, 15] and logic devices [16] where skyrmions in nanotracks are the information carriers.”
Current-induced spin-orbit torques in ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic systems (2018, background): “Similar ideas resulted in the proposition of AF skyrmions, either in the bilayer form or in bulk AFs, which display no skyrmion Hall effect and could also reach very high velocity in the latter case (Barker and Tretiakov, 2016; Tomasello et al., 2017; Zhang et al., 2015e).”
Skyrmion-electronics: writing, deleting, reading and processing magnetic skyrmions toward spintronic applications (2019, background): “In 2014, Zhang et al numerically demonstrated the possibility that a single isolated skyrmion in an easy-axis magnet can be transformed to a single isolated bimeron in an easy-plane magnet through a bridge-like narrow nanotrack junction connecting the easy-axis and easy-plane magnets [140].”
Beyond skyrmions: Review and perspectives of alternative magnetic quasiparticles (2020, background): “Conventional skyrmions have been considered for utility in logic devices [160], transistors [228], magnetic tunnel junctions [229, 230, 231], nano-oscillators [232], as microwave devices [233] or magnonic devices [234], neuromorphic applications [235, 236], as well as reservoir computing [237, 238],”