Magnetic Skyrmions: Current‐Induced Skyrmion Generation through Morphological Thermal Transitions in Chiral Ferromagnetic Heterostructures (Adv. Mater. 49/2018)

Abstract

Magnetic skyrmions are particle‐like chiral twists of the magnetization that promise advances in spin‐based data storage and logic device applications. In article number https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.201805461, Mathias Kläui, Geoffrey S. D. Beach, and co‐workers examine current‐induced generation of skyrmions in heavy‐metal/ferromagnet multilayers and show that Joule heat pulses can drive topological transitions in magnetic textures and enable skyrmion creation on nanosecond timescales.

Skyrmion-electronics: writing, deleting, reading and processing magnetic skyrmions toward spintronic applications

“…In 2016, Yuan and Wang theoretically demonstrated that a skyrmion can be created in a ferromagnetic nanodisk by applying a nano-second current pulse (j ~ 2.0 × 10 12 A m −2 ) [186]. Yin et al also suggested in a theoretical study that it [33], which turned out to be thermally-induced skyrmion generation as systematically studied recently by Lemesh et al [34]. Hrabec et al also reported the experimental creation of skyrmions induced by applying electric current (j ~ 2.8 × 10 11 A m −2 ) through an electric contact placed upon a symmetric magnetic bilayer Reprinted with permission from [198].…”

“…These topologically non-trivial spin textures can be one-dimensional (1D), two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) in real space, and usually carry integer or half-integer topological charges determined by their spin textures in the topological space . For most cases, the well-studied topological spin textures are those localized in 2D or quasi-2D magnetic thin films and multilayers [11,19,21,[23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36], because that magnetic thin films and multilayers are better understood and preferred for building nanoscale spintronic applications. Several recent works have also demonstrated promising properties of 3D topological spin textures [10,[37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50], leading to the prediction that 3D spin textures might be used in combination with 2D textures in the future.…”

“…Recently theor etical works have suggested that an isolated bimeron in either easy-plane ferromagnets or easy-plane antiferromagnets can be driven into motion by STTs [334,335,339]. Similar to the transformation from strip magnetic domains to magnetic skyrmions or bubbles via the 'pinching mechanism' [32,34,116,184,340], the mutual conversion between a skyrmion and a bimeron is also an important issue, which is essential for future spintronic circuits based on different topological spin textures. 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].…”