Nano-to-micro spatiotemporal imaging of magnetic skyrmion's life cycle

Abstract

Magnetic skyrmions are the self-organized topological spin textures behaving like particles. Because of their fast creation and typically long lifetime, experimental verification of skyrmion's creation/annihilation processes has been challenging. Here we successfully track skyrmions dynamics in defect-introduced Co9Zn9Mn2, by using pump-probe Lorentz transmission electron microscope. Following the nanosecond-photothermal excitation, we resolve 160-nm-skyrmion's proliferation at <1 ns, contraction at 5 ns, drift from 10 ns to 4 microsecond and coalescence at 5 microsecond. These motions relay the multiscale arrangement and relaxation of skyrmion clusters in a repeatable cycle of 20 kHz. Such repeatable dynamics of skyrmions, arising from the weakened but still persistent topological protection around defects, enables us to visualize the whole life of the skyrmions, as well as demonstrating the possible high-frequency manipulations of topological charges brought by skyrmions.

14 pages, 5 figures, Supplementary materials

References in corpus (4)

• A new class of chiral materials hosting magnetic skyrmions beyond room temperature
• Inertia and chiral edge modes of a skyrmion magnetic bubble
• Inertia, diffusion and dynamics of a driven skyrmion
• Skyrmion formation in a bulk chiral magnet at zero magnetic field and above room temperature

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• Kagome lattice promotes chiral spin fluctuations
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• Antiskyrmions and their electrical footprint in crystalline mesoscale structures of Mn${}_{1.4}$PtSn
• Diffusionless relaxation of half-skyrmion liquid, hexatic, and crystalline states in a chiral molecular crystal
• Antiferromagnetic Skyrmion Scattering Revealed by Direct Time-Resolved Imaging of Collective Dynamics