Publication Date:
2017-04-18
Description:
Author(s): Se Kwon Kim, Kyung-Jin Lee, and Yaroslav Tserkovnyak Skyrmions, swirling magnetic textures with a topological character, have been gaining much attention in spintronics due to the fundamental interest as well as their touted utility as information carriers in ultradense and low-power memory devices. Generally, a skyrmion behaves as a massive particle moving in a viscous medium and experiencing a Magnus force, which is proportional to its winding number and the spin polarization of the magnet. There is a class of tunable ferrimagnets, such as rare-earth transition-metal alloys, exhibiting the angular momentum compensation point at which the spin density changes sign. This raises the possibility to engineer both the magnitude and the sign of the Magnus force acting on the skyrmions in the ferrimagnets. The authors exploit this to suggest that ferrimagnetic skyrmions can exhibit snake trajectories along the line of the vanishing spin density, analogous to the snake orbits of electrons in a nonuniform magnetic field. This can be utilized as dynamically self-focusing racetracks for skyrmions, paving the way for skyrmion-based memory devices. [Phys. Rev. B 95, 140404(R)] Published Fri Apr 14, 2017
Keywords:
Magnetism
Print ISSN:
1098-0121
Electronic ISSN:
1095-3795
Topics:
Physics
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