An international team led by MIT associate professor of materials science and engineering Geoffrey Beach has demonstrated a practical way to use “skyrmions” to create a radical new high-speed, high-density data-storage method that could one day replace disk drives — and even replace high-speed RAM memory.

Rather than reading and writing data one bit at a time by changing the orientation of magnetized nanoparticles on a surface, Skyrmions could store data using only a tiny area of a magnetic surface — perhaps just a few atoms across — and for long periods of time, without the need for further energy input (unlike disk drives and RAM).

Beach and associates conceive skyrmions as little sub-nanosecond spin-generating eddies of magnetism controlled by electric fields — replacing the magnetic-disk system of reading and writing data one bit at a time. In experiments, skyrmions have been generated on a thin metallic film sandwiched with non-magnetic heavy metals and transition-metal ferromagnetic layers — exploiting a defect, such as a constriction in the magnetic track.*

Skyrmions are also highly stable to external magnetic and mechanical perturbations, unlike the individual magnetic poles in a conventional magnetic storage device — allowing for vastly more data to be written onto a surface of a given size.

A practical data-storage system

Beach has recently collaborated with researchers at MIT and others in Germany** to demonstrate experimentally for the first time that it’s possible to create skyrmions in specific locations, which is needed for a data-storage system. The new findings were reported October 2, 2017 in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

Conventional magnetic systems are now reaching speed and density limits set by the basic physics of their existing materials. The new system, once perfected, could provide a way to continue that progress toward ever-denser data storage, Beach says.

However, the researchers note that to create a commercialized system will require an efficient, reliable way to create skyrmions when and where they were needed, along with a way to read out the data (which now requires sophisticated, expensive X-ray magnetic spectroscopy). The team is now pursuing possible strategies to accomplish that.***

* The system focuses on the boundary region between atoms whose magnetic poles are pointing in one direction and those with poles pointing the other way. This boundary region can move back and forth within the magnetic material, Beach says. What he and his team found four years ago was that these boundary regions could be controlled by placing a second sheet of nonmagnetic heavy metal very close to the magnetic layer. The nonmagnetic layer can then influence the magnetic one, with electric fields in the nonmagnetic layer pushing around the magnetic domains in the magnetic layer. Skyrmions are little swirls of magnetic orientation within these layers. The key to being able to create skyrmions at will in particular locations lays in material defects. By introducing a particular kind of defect in the magnetic layer, the skyrmions become pinned to specific locations on the surface, the team found. Those surfaces with intentional defects can then be used as a controllable writing surface for data encoded in the skyrmions.

** The team also includes researchers at the Max Born Institute and the Institute of Optics and Atomic Physics, both in Berlin; the Institute for Laser Technologies in Medicine and Metrology at the University of Ulm, in Germany; and the Deutches Elektroniken-Syncrotron (DESY), in Hamburg. The work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy and the German Science Foundation.

*** The researchers believe an alternative way of reading the data is possible, using an additional metal layer added to the other layers. By creating a particular texture on this added layer, it may be possible to detect differences in the layer’s electrical resistance depending on whether a skyrmion is present or not in the adjacent layer.



Abstract of Field-free deterministic ultrafast creation of magnetic skyrmions by spin–orbit torques

Magnetic skyrmions are stabilized by a combination of external magnetic fields, stray field energies, higher-order exchange interactions and the Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interaction (DMI). The last favours homochiral skyrmions, whose motion is driven by spin–orbit torques and is deterministic, which makes systems with a large DMI relevant for applications. Asymmetric multilayers of non-magnetic heavy metals with strong spin–orbit interactions and transition-metal ferromagnetic layers provide a large and tunable DMI. Also, the non-magnetic heavy metal layer can inject a vertical spin current with transverse spin polarization into the ferromagnetic layer via the spin Hall effect. This leads to torques that can be used to switch the magnetization completely in out-of-plane magnetized ferromagnetic elements, but the switching is deterministic only in the presence of a symmetry-breaking in-plane field. Although spin–orbit torques led to domain nucleation in continuous films and to stochastic nucleation of skyrmions in magnetic tracks, no practical means to create individual skyrmions controllably in an integrated device design at a selected position has been reported yet. Here we demonstrate that sub-nanosecond spin–orbit torque pulses can generate single skyrmions at custom-defined positions in a magnetic racetrack deterministically using the same current path as used for the shifting operation. The effect of the DMI implies that no external in-plane magnetic fields are needed for this aim. This implementation exploits a defect, such as a constriction in the magnetic track, that can serve as a skyrmion generator. The concept is applicable to any track geometry, including three-dimensional designs.