Neutron study of in-plane skyrmions in MnSi thin films

Abstract

The magnetic structure of the in-plane skyrmions in epitaxial MnSi/Si(111) thin films is probed in three dimensions by the combination of polarized neutron reflectometry (PNR) and small angle neutron scattering (SANS). We demonstrate that skyrmions exist in a region of the phase diagram above at temperature of 10 K. PNR shows the skyrmions are confined to the middle of the film due to the potential well formed by the surface twists. However, SANS shows that there is considerable disorder within the plane indicating that the magnetic structure is a 2D skyrmion glass.

References in corpus (7)

• Spontaneous Skyrmion Ground States in Magnetic Metals
• Robust formation of skyrmions and topological Hall effect in epitaxial thin films of MnSi
• Magnetic phase diagram of MnSi inferred from magnetization and ac susceptibility
• Three-dimensional skyrmion states in thin films of cubic helimagnets
• Two-dimensional skyrmions and other solitonic structures in confinement-frustrated chiral nematics
• Surface twist instabilities and skyrmion states in chiral ferromagnets
• Extended elliptic skyrmion gratings in epitaxial MnSi thin films

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• Twists in Ferromagnetic Monolayers With Trigonal Prismatic Symmetry
• Giant enhancement of the skyrmion stability in a chemically strained helimagnet
• Skyrmion-Excited Spin Wave Fractal Network
• Meron configurations in easy-plane chiral magnets
• Thin Film Growth of Heavy Fermion Chiral Magnet YbNi3Al9
• On Curie temperature of B20-MnSi films
• Inducing Skyrmion Flop Transitions in Co${}_8$Zn${}_8$Mn${}_4$ at Room Temperature
• B20-MnSi films grown on Si(100) substrates with magnetic skyrmion signature