TY - JOUR
T1 - Defect-correlated skyrmions and controllable generation in perpendicularly magnetized CoFeB ultrathin films
AU - Yin, Haihong
AU - Zheng, Xiangyu
AU - Wang, Junlin
AU - Zhou, Yu
AU - Kuerbanjiang, Balati
AU - Li, Guanqi
AU - Lu, Xianyang
AU - Tong, Kaiyu
AU - Wang, Yichuan
AU - Wu, Jing
AU - Lazarov, Vlado
AU - Evans, Richard Francis Llewelyn
AU - Chantrell, Roy William
AU - Cai, Jianwang
AU - Liu, Bo
AU - Meng, Hao
AU - Xu, Yongbing
N1 - © 2021 Author(s). Published under an exclusive license by AIP Publishing.
PY - 2021/8/10
Y1 - 2021/8/10
N2 - Skyrmions have attracted significant interest due to their topological spin structures and fascinating physical features. The skyrmion phase arises in materials with a Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interaction at interfaces or in volume of non-centrosymmetric materials. Although skyrmions have been demonstrated experimentally, the general critical intrinsic relationship among fabrication, microstructures, magnetization, and the existence of skyrmions remains to be established. Here, two series of CoFeB ultrathin films with controlled atomic scale structures are employed to reveal this relationship. The amount of defects was artificially tuned by inverting the growth order, and skyrmions were shown to be preferentially formed in samples with more defects. By utilizing first-order reversal curves, the stable region and the skyrmion densities can be efficiently controlled in the return magnetization loops. These findings establish a general internal link from sample preparation to skyrmion generation and provide a general method for controlling skyrmion density.
AB - Skyrmions have attracted significant interest due to their topological spin structures and fascinating physical features. The skyrmion phase arises in materials with a Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interaction at interfaces or in volume of non-centrosymmetric materials. Although skyrmions have been demonstrated experimentally, the general critical intrinsic relationship among fabrication, microstructures, magnetization, and the existence of skyrmions remains to be established. Here, two series of CoFeB ultrathin films with controlled atomic scale structures are employed to reveal this relationship. The amount of defects was artificially tuned by inverting the growth order, and skyrmions were shown to be preferentially formed in samples with more defects. By utilizing first-order reversal curves, the stable region and the skyrmion densities can be efficiently controlled in the return magnetization loops. These findings establish a general internal link from sample preparation to skyrmion generation and provide a general method for controlling skyrmion density.
U2 - 10.1063/5.0057763
DO - 10.1063/5.0057763
M3 - Article
SN - 0003-6951
VL - 119
SP - 062402
JO - Applied Physics Letters
JF - Applied Physics Letters
IS - 6
M1 - 062402
ER -