Magnetic skyrmions: advances in physics and potential applications

By Albert Fert, N. Reyren, Vincent Cros. 2017

2,188 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Magnetic skyrmions are small swirling topological defects in the magnetization texture. Their stabilization and dynamics depend strongly on their topological properties. In most cases, they are induced by chiral interactions between atomic spins in non-centrosymmetric magnetic compounds or in thin films with broken inversion symmetry. Skyrmions can be extremely small, with diameters in the nanometre range, and behave as particles that can be moved, created and annihilated, which makes them suitable for ‘abacus’-type applications in information storage and logic technologies. Until recently, skyrmions had been observed only at low temperature and, in most cases, under large applied magnetic fields. An intense research effort has led to the identification of thin-film and multilayer structures in which skyrmions are now stable at room temperature and can be manipulated by electrical currents. The development of skyrmion-based topological spintronics holds promise for applications in the mid-term furure, even though many challenges, such as the achievement of writing, processing and reading functionalities at room temperature and in all-electrical manipulation schemes, still lie ahead. Magnetic skyrmions are topologically protected spin whirls that hold promise for applications because they can be controllably moved, created and annihilated. In this Review, the underlying physics of the stabilization of skyrmions at room temperature and their prospective use for spintronic applications are discussed.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/58f80a15d042e8ca387ccd416846d4ccd834a6ce

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Biomedical Engineering

In Condensed Matter Physics

Citations in the corpus

Current-induced spin-orbit torques in ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic systems (2018, background): “In this context, a major breakthrough has been the recent realization and control of individual metastable skyrmions at room temperatures, which shows promising potential for such applications (Fert et al., 2017; Jiang et al., 2017a).”
Antiferromagnetic spintronics (2016, background): “The physics of skyrmions and related applications have been, for example, extensively discussed for the case of ferromagnets by Nagaosa and Tokura (2013) and Fert, Reyren, and Cros (2017).”
Beyond skyrmions: Review and perspectives of alternative magnetic quasiparticles (2020, methodology): “Conventional skyrmions have for example been generated by directed, deterministic approaches such as spin torques or magnetic fields (see reviews [49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56]).”
Optical skyrmions and other topological quasiparticles of light (2022, neutral): “Magnetic skyrmions opened new avenues in high-density data storage and low-energy magnetic memory [11–13].”
Physical foundations and basic properties of magnetic skyrmions (2020, background): “[41].”
Very large Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction in two-dimensional Janus manganese dichalcogenides and its application to realize skyrmion states (2019, methodology): “graphene with creation of Rashba-like Fermi contours. The Edelstein effect [54 ] of such Rashba-like 2D electron gases could be used to inject a vertical spin current into the skyrmions and move them [51]. Altogether, our calculation results suggest that the Janus MnXY monolayers are good candidates”