EXPERIMENTAL OBSERVATION OF CHIRAL MAGNETIC BOBBERS AND NEW CONCEPT FOR MAGNETIC SOLID-STATE MEMORY

Authors

F. N. Rybakov M.N. Mikheev Institute of Metal Physics, Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences; Department of Physics, KTH-Royal Institute of Technology
A. B. Borisov M.N. Mikheev Institute of Metal Physics, Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.29006/1564-2291.JOR-2019.47(1).33

Keywords:

Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya Interaction, magnetic skyrmions, electron holography, bobber

Abstract

Chiral magnetic skyrmions are nanoscale vortex-like spin textures that form in the presence of an applied magnetic field in ferromagnets that support the DzyaloshinskiiMoriya interaction (DMI) because of strong spin-orbit coupling and broken inversion symmetry of the crystal. Recently, a new type of localized particle-like object – the chiral bobber (ChB) – was predicted theoretically (Rybakov et al., 2015) in such materials. Here, we report the direct observation of ChBs (Zheng et al., 2018) in thin films of B20-type FeGe by means of quantitative off-axis electron holography. Furthermore, we show that ChBs are able to coexist with skyrmions over a wide range of parameters, which suggests their possible practical applications in novel magnetic solid-state memory devices, in which a stream of binary data bits can be encoded by a sequence of skyrmions and bobbers.
Work was performed within the state task of FANO Russia (subject “Quantum,” No. g.r. 01201463332) (АААА-А18-118020190095-4)).

References

Zheng F., Rybakov F.N., and Borisov A.B. Experimental observation of chiral magnetic bobbers in B20-type FeGe. Nature Nanotechnology, 2018, Vol. 13, р. 451–455.

Rybakov F.N., Borisov A.B., Blügel S., and Kiselev N.S. New type of particlelike state in chiral magnets, Phys. Rev. Lett., 2015, Vol. 115, pp. 117201.