Sentences with phrase «knotlike skyrmions»

Incredibly tiny and tough to undo, magnetic skyrmions could help feed humankind's hunger for ever - smaller electronics.

A magnetic structure proposed for the natural oddity known as ball lightning makes an appearance in a newfound variety of a knotlike entity called a skyrmion, a team of scientists reports.

By studying skyrmions, researchers are expanding their understanding of how spins move through materials.

MAGNETIC KNOTS A skyrmion is a swirl (red) among the atoms of a magnetic material.

In fact, skyrmions were first proposed in the context of particles.

One possible issue: A skyrmion's swirling pattern makes it behave like a rotating object.

Today, the idea — with and without skyrmions — has caught on.

Skyrmions could continue that tradition.

Although skyrmions are made up of atoms, which remain stationary within the material, skyrmions can move around like a true particle, by sliding from one group of atoms to another.

Magnetic skyrmions: advances in physics and potential applications.

Within a skyrmion, the direction of the atoms» poles twists until the magnetization in the center points in the opposite direction of the magnetization outside.

On traditional hard drives, the magnetic regions that store data are about 10 times as large as the smallest skyrmions.

The result showed that a skyrmion racetrack might actually work, says study coauthor Mathias Kläui, a condensed matter physicist at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany.

Just as there's more than one way to tie a knot, there are several different types of skyrmions, formed with various shapes of magnetic twists.

By combining a large number of neuron - imitating skyrmions, the thinking goes, scientists could create a computer that operates something like a brain.

As some try to shrink room - temp skyrmions down, others are bringing them up to speed, to make for fast reading and writing of data.

For skyrmion - based racetrack memories to compete with current technologies, skyrmions must be small and move quickly and easily through a material.

Another idea is to use skyrmions for biologically inspired computers, which attempt to mimic the human brain (SN: 9/6/14, p. 10).

«The magnetism just twists around, and thus the skyrmion travels,» says condensed matter physicist Kirsten von Bergmann of the University of Hamburg.

Spontaneous atomic - scale magnetic skyrmion lattice in two dimensions.

Once skyrmions behave as desired, creating a racetrack memory with them is an obvious next step.

In a 2008 paper in Science, Parkin and colleagues demonstrated the beginnings of a racetrack memory based not on skyrmions, but on magnetic features called domain walls, which separate regions with different directions of magnetization in a material.

On the racetrack, skyrmions might hit a wall instead of staying in their lanes.

Skyrmions, which dwell within such magnetic habitats, are composed of groups of atoms with their magnetic poles oriented in whorls.

Tunable room - temperature magnetic skyrmions in Ir / Fe / Co / Pt multilayers.

Room - temperature chiral magnetic skyrmions in ultrathin magnetic nanostructures.

The magnetic knots» nimble nature suggests that skyrmions storing data in a computer could be shuttled to a sensor that would read off the information as the skyrmions pass by.

Now, researchers are seeking new kinds of skyrmions that stay on track.

But physicists are now fashioning a new parallel system called spintronics — of which skyrmions are a part — based on the motion of electron spin, that property that makes atoms magnetic (SN Online: 9/26/17).

Skyrmions are a type of «quasiparticle,» a disturbance within a material that behaves like a single particle, despite being a collective of many individual particles.

Skyrmions could help scientists achieve this kind of computation in the lab, without sapping much power.

Physicists are now on the hunt for skyrmions within a different realm: antiferromagnetic materials.

What's more, skyrmions can easily move through a material, pushed along by an electric current.

GIVE IT A WHIRL Skyrmions move across magnetic material by sliding from atom to atom.

At the same time, researchers are chasing after new kinds of skyrmions, which may be an even better fit for data storage.

Although scientists now know how to make room - temperature skyrmions, the heat - tolerant swirls, tens to hundreds of nanometers in diameter, tend to be too big to be very useful.

Stacking multiple layers of iridium, platinum and cobalt, Cros and colleagues created the first room - temperature skyrmions smaller than 100 nanometers, the researchers reported in May 2016 in Nature Nanotechnology.

The skyrmion field, Pfleiderer says, has «started to develop its own life.»

«The type of skyrmions you get is related to the crystal structure of the materials,» says physical chemist Claudia Felser of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids in Dresden, Germany.

Bloch skyrmions are found in the thick, asymmetric crystals in which skyrmions were first detected, and Néel skyrmions tend to show up in thin films.

Materials scientists still need to find an antiferromagnetic material with the necessary properties to form skyrmions, Kläui says.

Antiferromagnetic skyrmions might also move faster, Kläui says.

Skyrmions have finally come out of the cold, though they are finicky and difficult to control.

To make such a system work with skyrmions, scientists need to make the knots easier to wrangle at room temperature.

Instead, skyrmions might be useful in devices meant for performing calculations.

Whether or not skyrmions end up in future gadgets, the swirls are part of a burgeoning electronics ecosystem.

Felser, Parkin and colleagues detected a new kind of skyrmion, an antiskyrmion, in a thin layer of such a material.

One thing, however, has held skyrmions back: Until recently, they could be created and controlled only in the frigid cold.

Skyrmions don't move in the same direction as an electric current, but at an angle to it.

Ranging from a nanometer to hundreds of nanometers in diameter, skyrmions «are probably the smallest magnetic systems... that can be imagined or that can be realized in nature,» says physicist Vincent Cros of Unité Mixte de Physique CNRS / Thales in Palaiseau, France.