Controllable Fast, Tiny Magnetic Bits

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

Solid-state devices built on these skyrmions could someday replace current magnetic storage hard drives. Streams of magnetic skyrmions can act as bits for computer applications. “In these materials, we can readily pattern magnetic tracks,” Beach said during a presentation at MRS.

These new findings could be applied to racetrack memory devices, which were developed by Stuart Parkin at IBM. A key to engineering these materials for use in racetrack devices is engineering deliberate defects into the material where skyrmions can form, because skyrmions form where there are defects in the material.

“One can engineer by putting notches in this type of system,” said Beach, who also is co-director of the Materials Research Laboratory (MRL) at MIT. A current pulse injected into the material forms the skyrmions at a notch. “The same current pulse can be used to write and delete,” he said. These skyrmions form extremely quickly, in less than a billionth of a second, Beach says.

Says Caretta: “To be able to have a practical operating logic or memory racetrack device, you have to write the bit, so that’s what we talk about in creating the magnetic quasi particle, and you have to make sure that the written bit is very small and you have to translate that bit through the material at a very fast rate,” Caretta says.

Marrows, the Leeds professor, adds: “Applications in skyrmion-based spintronics, will benefit, although again it’s a bit early to say for sure what will be the winners among the various proposals, which include memories, logic devices, oscillators and neuromorphic devices,”

A remaining challenge is the best way to read these skyrmion bits. Work in the Beach group is continuing in this area, Lemesh says, noting that the current challenge is to discover a way to detect these skyrmions electrically in order to use them in computers or phones.

“Yea, so you don’t have to take your phone to a synchrotron to read a bit,” Caretta says. “As a result of some of the work done on ferrimagnets and similar systems called anti-ferromagnets, I think the majority of the field will actually start to shift toward these types of materials because of the huge promise that they hold.”

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