After an initial discovery in Germany, this is a field that has been widely studied in France, including by the Fert team, who recently demonstrated the possibility of occurrence of
these skyrmions at room temperature, making even more likely their use in practice [2].
The multiple repetition of such layers ensures that there is enough magnetic material and that it should also be possible to produce
skyrmions at room temperature, Heinze continued.
Not exact matches
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.
At the same time, researchers are chasing after new kinds of
skyrmions, which may be an even better fit for data storage.
To make such a system work with
skyrmions, scientists need to make the knots easier to wrangle
at room temperature.
Skyrmions don't move in the same direction as an electric current, but
at an angle to it.
Like antiskyrmions, antiferromagnetic
skyrmions wouldn't zip off
at an angle to an electric current, so they should be easier to control.
However, until very recently, the only materials known to exhibit
skyrmions did so
at extremely low temperatures.
A microwave nano - oscillator based on
skyrmions could operate
at three resonant frequencies, corresponding to the three modes.
In order to use
skyrmions as a storage medium, it must be possible to manufacture the surfaces or interfaces on a sufficiently large scale, they must contain enough of the magnetic material, and the magnetic vortex must also occur
at room temperature.
To prepare these
skyrmions, scientists
at Mainz University prepared small magnetic discs.
Aurelien Manchon, an Associate Professor of Material Science and Engineering
at the University, notes that one of the main reasons for the appeal of
skyrmions is their ability to avoid defects or uneven patches in thin films that would normally trap or «pin» a magnetic charge.
Researchers
at UCLA and the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory announced today a new method for creating magnetic
skyrmion bubbles
at room temperature.
To make
skyrmion bubbles, researchers crafted a setup made out of tiny, precise, layered structures made using a process called lithography
at the Center for Nanoscale Materials, a DOE Office of Science user facility
at Argonne.
From left to right: Argonne researchers Wanjun Jiang, Suzanne G.E. te Velthuis, and Axel Hoffman published a new way to make magnetic
skyrmion bubbles
at room temperature.