Skyrmions get perpendicular – and push the door open for high density data storage
Scientists from ShanghaiTech University, Diamond Light Source, the SOLEIL synchrotron and University of Oxford report in a recent issue of Nano Letters on their discovery of a novel skyrmion surface state that exists in applied in-plane fields – much different from the usual out-of-plane geometry. In this geometry, magnetic signals from the skyrmion lattice phase settle down in inconvenient reciprocal space locations, making resonant elastic X-ray scattering (REXS) on the chiral magnet Cu2OSeO3 a challenging job to carry out. By combining the complementary capabilities of the soft X-ray diffractometers at two synchrotrons (Diamond and SOLEIL) on the very same sample, the new state was unambiguously identified.
>Read more on the Diamond Light Source website
Image: Illustration of the conventional in-plane skyrmion state (a) and the novel perpendicular skyrmion state (b) in the non-centrosymmetric skyrmion system Cu2OSeO3. Whereas a conventional planar skyrmion takes up an area of A=d2 (d is the skyrmion diameter), a perpendicular skyrmion has a much reduced lateral footprint of A = w d (with w the width of the ridge) which is advantages for skyrmion memory applications. The REXS experiments were carried out in the RASOR diffractometer at beamline I10 in Diamond, and in RESOXS at the beamline SEXTANTS in Soleil (St. Aubin, France).