Observation of Room-Temperature Magnetic Skyrmions and their Current-Driven Dynamics in Ultrathin Metallic Ferromagnets

Nature Materials (2016) doi:10.1038/nmat4593

(03/01/2016) - C-SPIN PI Geoff Beach and his group have just published a paper in the latest issue of Nature Materials. The topic: magnetic skyrmions, which have the potential to function as bits that can be read, written, and stored with extremely low amounts of energy. Until recently, however, skymions have only been observed in exotic materials at low temperatures. Beach and his group observed stable magnetic skyrmions at room temperature in ultrathin transition metal magnets using X-ray microscopy. They also demonstrated the ability to drive trains of skyrmions at speeds exceeding 100 m/s – fast enough, in other words, to meet industry standards for computing devices. These observations potentially open a wide door to room-temperature skyrmion spintronic devices. Read the Paper.