Journal Article

Electrical detection of single magnetic skyrmions in metallic multilayers at room temperature

Reyren, Nicolas, Maccariello, Davide, Collin, Sophie, Bouzehouane, Karim, Cros, Vincent, Legrand, William, Garcia, Karin, Fert, Albert

2018

Overview

Magnetic skyrmions are topologically protected whirling spin textures that can be stabilized in magnetic materials by an asymmetric exchange interaction between neighbouring spins that imposes a fixed chirality. Their small size, together with the robustness against external perturbations, make magnetic skyrmions potential storage bits in a novel generation of memory and logic devices. To this aim, their contribution to the electrical transport properties of a device must be characterized—however, the existing demonstrations are limited to low temperatures and mainly in magnetic materials with a B20 crystal structure. Here we combine concomitant magnetic force microscopy and Hall resistivity measurements to demonstrate the electrical detection of sub-100 nm skyrmions in a multilayered thin film at room temperature. Furthermore, we detect and analyse the Hall signal of a single skyrmion, which indicates that it arises from the anomalous Hall effect with a negligible contribution from the topological Hall effect.

• Publisher: Nature Publishing Group
• Subject: Chirality / Crystal structure / Electromagnetism / Hall effect / Hypothetical particles / Low temperature / Magnetic fields / Magnetic materials / Magnetism / Memory devices / Multilayered thin films / Multilayers / Particle theory / Protective coatings / Room temperature / Thin films