Two-dimensional skyrmion bags in liquid crystals and ferromagnets

Reconfigurable, ordered matter offers great potential for future low-power computer memory by storing information in energetically stable configurations. Among these, skyrmions—which are topologically protected, robust excitations that have been demonstrated in chiral magnets 1 – 4 and in liquid cry...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature physics 2019-07, Vol.15 (7), p.655-659
Main Authors: Foster, David, Kind, Charles, Ackerman, Paul J., Tai, Jung-Shen B., Dennis, Mark R., Smalyukh, Ivan I.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
639/301/923/919
639/766/119/1001
639/766/119/1002
Atomic
Classical and Continuum Physics
CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSICS
Complex Systems
Computer memory
Computer simulation
Condensed Matter Physics
Configurations
Crystals
Ferromagnetism
Hypothetical particles
Letter
Liquid crystals
Magnetic materials
Magnetic storage
Mathematical and Computational Physics
Molecular
Optical and Plasma Physics
Particle theory
Physics
Physics and Astronomy
Robustness (mathematics)
spintronics
structure of solids and liquids
Theoretical
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Summary:Reconfigurable, ordered matter offers great potential for future low-power computer memory by storing information in energetically stable configurations. Among these, skyrmions—which are topologically protected, robust excitations that have been demonstrated in chiral magnets 1 – 4 and in liquid crystals 5 – 7 —are driving much excitement about potential spintronic applications 8 . These information-encoding structures topologically resemble field configurations in many other branches of physics and have a rich history 9 , although chiral condensed-matter systems so far have yielded realizations only of elementary full and fractional skyrmions. Here we describe stable, high-degree multi-skyrmion configurations where an arbitrary number of antiskyrmions are contained within a larger skyrmion. We call these structures skyrmion bags. We demonstrate them experimentally and numerically in liquid crystals and numerically in micromagnetic simulations either without or with magnetostatic effects. We find that skyrmion bags act like single skyrmions in pairwise interaction and under the influence of current in magnetic materials, and are thus an exciting proposition for topological magnetic storage and logic devices. Structures containing multiple skyrmions inside a larger skyrmion—called skyrmion bags—are experimentally created in liquid crystals and theoretically predicted in magnetic materials. These may have applications in information storage technology.
ISSN:1745-2473
1745-2481
DOI:10.1038/s41567-019-0476-x