posted on 2019-01-03, 00:00authored byZhipeng Hou, Qiang Zhang, Guizhou Xu, Senfu Zhang, Chen Gong, Bei Ding, Hang Li, Feng Xu, Yuan Yao, Enke Liu, Guangheng Wu, Xi-xiang Zhang, Wenhong Wang
The
discovery of magnetic skyrmion bubbles in centrosymmetric magnets
has been receiving increasing interest from the research community,
due to the fascinating physics of topological spin textures and its
possible applications to spintronics. However, key challenges remain,
such as how to manipulate the nucleation of skyrmion bubbles to exclude
the trivial bubbles or metastable skyrmion bubbles that usually coexist
with skyrmion bubbles in the centrosymmetric magnets. Here, we report
having performed this task by applying spatially geometric confinement
to a centrosymmetric frustrated Fe3Sn2 magnet.
We demonstrate that the spatially geometric confinement can indeed
stabilize the skyrmion bubbles by effectively suppressing the formation
of trivial bubbles and metastable skyrmion bubbles. We also show that
the critical magnetic field for the nucleation of the skyrmion bubbles
in the confined Fe3Sn2 nanostripes is drastically
less, by an order of magnitude, than that required in the thin plate
without geometrical confinement. By analyzing how the width and thickness
of the nanostripes affect the spin textures of skyrmion bubbles, we
infer that the topological transition of skyrmion bubbles is closely
related to the dipole–dipole interaction, which we find is
consistent with theoretical simulations. The results presented here
bring us closer to achieving the fabrication of skyrmion-based racetrack
memory devices.