A strategy for the design of skyrmion racetrack memories

By Riccardo Tomasello, Eduardo Martinez, R. Zivieri, L. Torres, Mario Carpentieri, Giovanni Finocchio. Scientific Reports, 2014

900 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Magnetic storage based on racetrack memory is very promising for the design of ultra-dense, low-cost and low-power storage technology. Information can be coded in a magnetic region between two domain walls or, as predicted recently, in topological magnetic objects known as skyrmions. Here, we show the technological advantages and limitations of using Bloch and Néel skyrmions manipulated by spin current generated within the ferromagnet or via the spin-Hall effect arising from a non-magnetic heavy metal underlayer. We found that the Néel skyrmion moved by the spin-Hall effect is a very promising strategy for technological implementation of the next generation of skyrmion racetrack memories (zero field, high thermal stability and ultra-dense storage). We employed micromagnetics reinforced with an analytical formulation of skyrmion dynamics that we developed from the Thiele equation. We identified that the excitation, at high currents, of a breathing mode of the skyrmion limits the maximal velocity of the memory.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/63b8f4c87d93e93cb93af2044a971b1b501f581d

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 Electrical and Electronic Engineering

In Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

Citations in the corpus

Interface-Induced Phenomena in Magnetism (2016, positive): “A study by [Tomasello et al., 2014] considered both Néel and Bloch skyrmions driven either by spin Hall effects (spin-orbit torques) or spin-transfer torques, and showed that for Néel skyrmions driven by spin Hall effects, current densities only slightly higher than examined in [Sampaio et al.”
Skyrmion Hall effect revealed by direct time-resolved X-ray microscopy (2016, background): “Page 4 of 24 observe a large skyrmion Hall angle and find a strong dependence on the skyrmion velocity that cannot be explained by standard micromagnetic simulations that only include the conventionally used damping-like (DL)-SOT.(16) We find that micromagnetic predictions qualitatively reproduce th”
Skyrmions in magnetic multilayers (2017, methodology): “Assuming a Néel skyrmion as a rigid point-like quasiparticle (namely no distortion of its shape during motion), the translational motion that is driven by the SOT from the spin Hall effect can be studied by a modified Thiele equation [95, 235]:”
Tunable room-temperature magnetic skyrmions in Ir/Fe/Co/Pt multilayers. (2016, neutral): “The myriad proposals of skyrmion-based memory devices predominantly build upon either (a) the nucleation or deletion of single skyrmions in nanostructures 8,9,28 , or (b) the dynamics of a train of skyrmions in a racetrack conﬁguration 30,42,43 .”