A first step towards controlling skyrmion movement

Skyrmions are in the news again, thanks to an advance made by a Spintec team, in conjunction with two other laboratories*. The researchers successfully controlled the movement of skyrmions—quasi-particles with potential applications for magnetic memories—in situ by applying a gate voltage to reverse their chirality, or spin direction.

This is an important step towards controlling the movement of individual skyrmions, a prerequisite to their use as memory units or logic gates. The team now needs to do some basic research into chirality inversion and explore possible applications. The idea is to replicate their initial experiment using nanometric skyrmions, with the long-term goal of optimizing memory density, and to create nano-equipment with movement guidance channels.

*Institut Néel and CNRS Villetaneuse

Contact: helene.bea@cea.fr

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