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Effect of disorder on the skyrmion phase in FeGe thin films, The
Venuti, Michael Brooks
Venuti, Michael Brooks
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2023
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Magnetic skyrmions and antiskyrmions are nano-scale swirls of magnetization which form under the influence of chiral interactions between atomic spins in non-centrosymmetric magnetic materials (e.g. FeGe or Cu2OSeO3) or magnetic thin films with broken inversion symmetry. They are of great interest to be used as information carriers in next-generation, low energy spintronic applications, since they are predicted to require less energy to manipulate than charge currents in semiconductor or ferromagnetic domain-based logic, and also have considerable stability due to their topological protection. In order to construct a skyrmion-based spintronic device, one must have a full understanding of skyrmion dynamics, specifically, how they interact with material disorder. We report on evidence of a skyrmion-antiskyrmion system in thin films of epitaxial B20-phase FeGe which has been irradiated with 2.8 MeV Au4+ ions at varying fluences. We show that these irradiations induce amorphous regions in the crystalline material, enabling the system to form antiskyrmions in the amorphous domains and skyrmions in the crystalline domains. We identify the existence of these topological magnetic phases with topological Hall effect measurements. We additionally report on analysis techniques used to map all magnetic phase boundaries in a Cu2OSeO3 single crystal. This work will eventually be used to analyze skyrmion-defect interactions in Cu2OSeO3 of varying thicknesses.
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