The skyrmion annihilations induced by local reversal of background field in a skyrmion lattice

Abstract

The understanding of the creation and annihilation dynamics of a magnetic skyrmion is significant due to its potential applications in information storage and spintronics. Although there have been extensive investigations on the annihilation of isolated skyrmions, topological annihilation in a periodic skyrmion lattice is a more complex process. We report a micromagnetic simulation study about the annihilation process of a two-dimensional (2D) skyrmion triangular lattice triggered by a uniform field H REV of comparable size to the skyrmion, which is opposite to the direction of the background field, revealing two annihilation modes. When the H REV center is within the range of a skyrmion, the neighboring skyrmions annihilate in-situ, while the center is between adjacent skyrmions, an anti-skyrmion is induced in the interstitial region. Both mechanisms tend to experience the intermediate topological vortex or antivortex structure, and the spin system undergoes a long period of relaxation to reach a stable state after the topological charge is stabilized. Our results present a local annihilation scheme that is easy to achieve in a 2D skyrmion lattice and highlight the role of interaction between skyrmions in the transformation between different kinds of topological defects.