Blowing magnetic skyrmion bubbles

By Wanjun Jiang, P. Upadhyaya, Wei Zhang, Guoqiang Yu, M. Jungfleisch, F. Fradin, J. Pearson, Y. Tserkovnyak, Kang L. Wang, O. Heinonen and 2 more. Science, 2015

1,316 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Skyrmions emerge in trilayers Skyrmions are tiny whirlpools of magnetic spin with potential to act as carriers of information in future devices. Skyrmions have been observed in multiple materials but usually at impractically low temperatures. Jiang et al. used a constriction in a trilayer system to create skyrmions at room temperature (see the Perspective by von Bergmann). The authors pushed elongated magnetic domains through the constriction using an in-plane current, causing individual skyrmion bubbles to form. Science, this issue p. 283; see also p. 234 In-plane current is used to push stripe-shaped magnetic domains through a constriction, creating skyrmions on the other side. [Also see Perspective by von Bergmann] The formation of soap bubbles from thin films is accompanied by topological transitions. Here we show how a magnetic topological structure, a skyrmion bubble, can be generated in a solid-state system in a similar manner. Using an inhomogeneous in-plane current in a system with broken inversion symmetry, we experimentally “blow” magnetic skyrmion bubbles from a geometrical constriction. The presence of a spatially divergent spin-orbit torque gives rise to instabilities of the magnetic domain structures that are reminiscent of Rayleigh-Plateau instabilities in fluid flows. We determine a phase diagram for skyrmion formation and reveal the efficient manipulation of these dynamically created skyrmions, including depinning and motion. The demonstrated current-driven transformation from stripe domains to magnetic skyrmion bubbles could lead to progress in skyrmion-based spintronics.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d6e5d53a2f40bf44dff3ccb776c7b889e2a0e758

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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): “The nm size of the skyrmion combined with the low current density needed to induce its motion [11, 13, 14] would lead to devices with unprecedented combination of high storage density, large data transfer rate and low power consumption [7, 15].”
Current-induced spin-orbit torques in ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic systems (2018, background): “Many experiments have revealed skyrmions motion under current, either along or against the direction of the electron flow, in most cases in agreement with the DMI and DL SOT sign (Hrabec et al., 2017; Jiang et al., 2015, 2017b; Litzius et al., 2017; Woo et al., 2016; Yu et al., 2016a).”
Opportunities at the Frontiers of Spintronics (2015, methodology): “More recently it was shown that skyrmions can also be generated from instabilities [84] that are similar to Rayleigh-Plateau instabilities in surface-tension-dominated fluid flow [100].”
Tunable room-temperature magnetic skyrmions in Ir/Fe/Co/Pt multilayers. (2016, neutral): “Multi-layer skyrmions have been imaged using synchrotron-based microscopy techniques 20–22 , with recent demonstrations of their conﬁnement 20,22 , nucleation and dynamics 21,25,26 in constricted geometries.”