Obtaining stable magnetic beams at room temperature and zero field

Recently, the research team led by Professor DU Haifeng from the High Magnetic Field Laboratory of the Hefei Institute of Physical Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences obtained stable magnetic beams at room temperature without the use of a magnetic field external.

Their work was published in Nature Communications.

Topological magnetic structures are a type of spin arrangement with non-trivial topological properties. These structures show promise as next-generation data carriers and could overcome the limitations of traditional magnetic storage technologies in spintronics.

In previous research, the team proposed a method to induce magnetic skyrmion beams in a chiral helimagnetic material called FeGe. However, obtaining stable magnetic beams at room temperature and without an external magnetic field remains an important challenge for practical applications in spintronics.

To address this challenge, the researchers ingeniously combined pulsed currents with inverted magnetic fields in the chiral helimagnetic material Co.₈Zn_tenMn₂. This approach allowed them to obtain a wide variety of chiral magnetic skyrmions at room temperature, thus avoiding the complex field cooling processes required in the previous generation of skyrmion beams.

Additionally, they introduced a special zero-field vertical spiral domain magnetization background to stabilize the magnetic skyrmion beams. By establishing a complete magnetic field-temperature phase diagram for the skyrmion beams, they finally obtained isolated and stable magnetic skyrmion beams at room temperature with zero external magnetic field under free boundary conditions.

According to the team, this work could improve the development of topological spintronic devices, by taking advantage of the constraint of topological freedom parameters.