Figure 1: Takahiro Shimojima (seated) using an ultrafast transmission electron microscope to look at skyrmions in a thin film of cobalt zinc manganese. 2021 RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science
For the first time, an all-RIKEN team has watched the entire life cycle of tiny magnetic whirlpools, revealing their birth, movement and death1. This will be important for informing the development of future low-power memory devices based on these magnetic swirls.
First observed experimentally in 2009, skyrmions are formed when the magnetic fields of a material’s atoms organize into whirlpool-like structures. Skyrmions can drift around as if they were particles and are promising for conveying data in low-power computer chips and memory devices.
Researchers have previously studied how skyrmions behave during individual stages of their lives. But these events typically take place at vastly different timescales-from less than a nanosecond to many microseconds-and at lengths spanning from nanometers to micrometers. That has made it difficult to follow a skyrmion over its whole life and to understand how multiple skyrmions interact over that time.
“This behavior would directly determine the performance of skyrmion-based memory devices,” notes Takahiro Shimojima of the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science (CEMS).
Now, Shimojima and six CEMS colleagues have studied skyrmion over their entire life times in a thin film of cobalt zinc manganese.
Since skyrmions can typically live for...
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