Magnetic skyrmions in confined geometries : effect of the magnetic field and the disorder

Abstract

We report on the effect of the lateral confinement and a perpendicular magnetic field on isolated room-temperature magnetic skyrmions in sputtered Pt/Co/MgO nanotracks and nanodots. We show that the skyrmions size can be easily tuned by playing on the lateral dimensions of the nanostructures and by using external magnetic field amplitudes of a few mT, which allow to reach sub-100 nm diameters. Our XMCD-PEEM observations also highlight the important role of the pinning on the skyrmions size and stability under an out-of-plane magnetic field. Micromagnetic simulations reveal that the effect of local pinning can be well accounted for by considering the thin film grain structure with local anisotropy variations and reproduce well the dependence of the skyrmion diameter on the magnetic field and the geometry.

17 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Additive interfacial chiral interaction in multilayers for stabilization of small individual skyrmion at room temperature
• Skyrmion Hall Effect Revealed by Direct Time-Resolved X-Ray Microscopy
• Skyrmion-skyrmion and skyrmion-edge repulsions in skyrmion-based racetrack memory
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Cited by in corpus (13)

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• Targeted Writing and Deleting of Magnetic Skyrmions in Two-Terminal Nanowire Devices
• Robust and programmable logic-in-memory devices exploiting skyrmion confinement and channeling using local energy barriers
• Transformations from stripy states to skyrmion crystals
• Energy-efficient generation of skyrmion phases in Co/Ni/Pt-based multilayers using Joule heating
• Particle-continuum-medium duality of skyrmions
• Thermal motion of skyrmion arrays in granular films
• Control of skyrmion chirality in Ta/FeCoB/TaOx trilayers by TaOx oxidation and FeCoB thickness