Abstract
Topological spin textures can serve as non-volatile information carriers. Here we study the current-induced dynamics of an isolated magnetic skyrmion on a nanoscale square-grid pinning pattern formed by orthogonal defect lines with reduced magnetic anisotropy. The skyrmion on the square grid can be pixelated with a quantized size of the grid. We demonstrate that the position, size, and shape of skyrmion on the square grid are electrically configurable. The skyrmion center is quantized to be on the grid and the skyrmion may show a hopping motion instead of a continuous motion. We find that the skyrmion Hall effect can be perfectly prohibited due to the pinning effect of the grid. The pixelated skyrmion can be harnessed to build future programmable racetrack memory, multistate memory, and logic computing device. Our results will be a basis for digital information storage and computation based on pixelated topological spin textures on artificial pinning patterns.
Highlights
Topological spin textures can serve as non-volatile information carriers
The local modification of perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (PMA) can result in an energy barrier, which plays a key role on the confinement and pinning of skyrmions
We report the properties of a skyrmion in a magnetic thin film with the square-grid pinning pattern formed by nanoscale orthogonal defect lines with reduced PMA
Summary
Topological spin textures can serve as non-volatile information carriers. Here we study the current-induced dynamics of an isolated magnetic skyrmion on a nanoscale square-grid pinning pattern formed by orthogonal defect lines with reduced magnetic anisotropy. By locally modifying PMA or other magnetic properties it is envisioned that one can fabricate different types of artificial pinning patterns on magnetic materials, such as parallel defect lines, grids, and square patterns[18,86,89,90,91,92,93,94,95,96,97,98,99,100,101,102,103,104,105,106,107,108,109] These artificial pinning patterns may lead to very special static and dynamic behaviors of topological spin textures interacting with them[18,86,89,90,91,92,93,94,95,96,97,98,99,100,101,102,103,104,105,106,107,108,109]. The artificial pinning patterns would offer the possibility to study basic science issues since particles and quasi-particles (e.g., superconducting vortices and colloids) on periodic substrates is a wide-ranging problem[18,110,111,112,113,114,115,116]
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