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.
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.
Not exact matches
Tunable room -
temperature magnetic
skyrmions in Ir / Fe / Co / Pt multilayers.
Room -
temperature chiral magnetic
skyrmions in ultrathin magnetic nanostructures.
To make such a system work with
skyrmions, scientists need to make the knots easier to wrangle at room
temperature.
Observation of room -
temperature magnetic
skyrmions and their current - driven dynamics in ultrathin metallic ferromagnets.
However, until very recently, the only materials known to exhibit
skyrmions did so at extremely low
temperatures.
Hall and colleagues created their
skyrmion in a state of matter called a Bose - Einstein condensate, composed of atoms cooled to a
temperature so low that they all take on the same quantum state and begin acting as if they are one unified entity (SN: 10/13/01, p. 230).
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.
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.
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].
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.
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.