Why skyrmions could have a lot in common with glass and high-temperature superconductors
Spawned by the spins of electrons in magnetic materials, these tiny whirlpools behave like independent particles and could be the future of computing. Experiments with SLAC’s X-ray laser are revealing their secrets.
Scientists have known for a long time that magnetism is created by the spins of electrons lining up in certain ways. But about a decade ago, they discovered another astonishing layer of complexity in magnetic materials: Under the right conditions, these spins can form little vortexes or whirlpools that act like particles and move around independently of the atoms that spawned them.
The tiny whirlpools are called skyrmions, named after Tony Skyrme, the British physicist who predicted their existence in 1962. Their small size and sturdy nature – like knots that are hard to undo – have given rise to a rapidly expanding field devoted to understanding them better and exploiting their strange qualities.
“These objects represent some of the most sophisticated forms of magnetic order that we know about,” said Josh Turner, a staff scientist at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and principal investigator with the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES) at SLAC.
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Images: Top: Images based on simulations show how three phases of matter, including skyrmions – tiny whirlpools created by the spins of electrons – can form in certain magnetic materials. They are stripes of electron spin (left); hexagonal lattices (right); and an in-between phase (center) that’s a mixture of the two. In this middle, glass-like state, skyrmions move very slowly, like cars in a traffic jam – one of several discoveries made in recent studies by scientists at SLAC, Stanford, Berkeley Lab and UC San Diego. Bottom: Patterns formed in a detector during experiments that explored fundamentals of skyrmion behavior at SLAC’s Linac Coherent Light Source X-ray free-electron laser.
Credit: Esposito et al., Applied Physics Letters, 2020