Controlling magnetic skyrmion nucleation with Ga+ ion irradiation

Abstract

In this paper, we show that magnetic skyrmion nucleation can be controlled using Ga+ ion irradiation, which manipulates the magnetic interface effects (in particular the magnetic anisotropy and Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction) that govern the stability and energy cost of skyrmions in thin film systems. We systematically and quantitatively investigated what effect these changes have on the nucleation of magnetic skyrmions. Our results indicate that the energy cost of skyrmion nucleation can be reduced up to 26% in the studied dose range and that it scales approximately linearly with the square root of the domain-wall energy density. Moreover, the total number of nucleated skyrmions in irradiated devices after nucleation was found to depend linearly on the ion dose and could be doubled compared to nonirradiated devices. These results show that ion irradiation cannot only be used to enable local nucleation of skyrmions, but that it also allows for fine control of the threshold and efficiency of the nucleation process.

Main: 17 pages, 3 figures; Supplemental Material: 7 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Advances in the Physics of Magnetic Skyrmions and Perspective for Technology
• Additive interfacial chiral interaction in multilayers for stabilization of small individual skyrmion at room temperature
• Deterministic Generation and Guided Motion of Magnetic Skyrmions by Focused He${}^{+}$-Ion Irradiation
• Local control of magnetic interface effects in chiral Ir$|$Co$|$Pt multilayers using Ga${}^{+}$ ion irradiation
• Skyrmion generation from irreversible fission of stripes in chiral multilayer films

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Ratchet motion of magnetic skyrmions driven by surface acoustic sawtooth waves