Degenerate skyrmionic states in synthetic antiferromagnets

Abstract

Topological magnetic textures, characterized by integer topological charge S, are potential candidates in future magnetic logic and memory devices, due to their smaller size and expected low threshold current density for their motion. An essential requirement to stabilize them is the Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interaction (DMI) which promotes a particular chirality, leading to a unique value of S in a given material. However, recently coexistence of skyrmions and antiskyrmions, with opposite topological charge, in frustrated ferromagnets has been predicted using J 1–J 2–J 3 classical Heisenberg model, which opens new perspectives, to use the topological charge as an additional degree of freedom. In this work, we propose another approach of using a synthetic antiferromagnetic system, where one of the ferromagnetic (FM) layer has isotropic and the other FM layer has anisotropic DMI to promote the existence of skyrmions and antiskyrmions, respectively. A frustrated interaction arises due to the coupling between the magnetic textures in the FM layers, which enables the stabilization and coexistence of 6 novel elliptical topological textures.