Tuning the Coexistence Regime of Incomplete and Tubular Skyrmions in Ferromagnetic/Ferrimagnetic/Ferromagnetic Trilayers

ACS Appl Mater Interfaces. 2022 Jul 13. doi: 10.1021/acsami.2c06608. Online ahead of print.

Abstract

The development of skyrmionic devices requires a suitable tuning of material parameters to stabilize skyrmions and control their density. It has been demonstrated recently that different skyrmion types can be simultaneously stabilized at room temperature in heterostructures involving ferromagnets, ferrimagnets, and heavy metals, offering a new platform of coding binary information in the type of skyrmion instead of the presence/absence of skyrmions. Here, we tune the energy landscape of the two skyrmion types in such heterostructures by engineering the geometrical and material parameters of the individual layers. We find that a fine adjustment of the ferromagnetic layer thickness, and thus its magnetic anisotropy, allows the trilayer system to support either one of the skyrmion types or the coexistence of both and with varying densities.

Keywords: magnetic anisotropy; magnetic force microscopy, micromagnetic simulations; magnetic multilayers; skyrmion type.