Magnetic skyrmions are stable quasi-particles that can be generated in (some) ferromagnetic materials with conceivable solutions in electronics, assuming they can be created and moved at will. The creation and moving of such skyrmions has now been demonstrated by [Yubin Ji] et al. with a research article in Advanced Materials. This first ever achievement by these researchers of the Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science (KRISS) was more power efficient than previously demonstrated manipulation of magnetic skyrmions in thicker (3D) materials.
Magnetic skyrmions are sometimes described as ‘magnetic vortices’, forming statically stable solitons. For magnetic skyrmions their stability comes from the topological stability, as changing the atomic spin of the atoms inside the skyrmion would require overcoming a significant energy barrier.
In the case of the KRISS researchers, electrical pulses together with a magnetic field were used to create magnetic skyrmions in the ferromagnetic (Fe3GaTe2, or FGaT) film, after which a brief (50 µs) electric current pulse was applied. This demonstrated that the magnetic skyrmions can be moved this way, with the solitons moving parallel to the electron flow injection, making them quite steerable.
While practical applications of magnetic skyrmions are likely to be many years off, it is this kind of fundamental research that will enable future magnetic storage and spintronics-related devices.
Featured image: Direct imaging of the magnetic skyrmions. The scale bars represent 300 nm. (Credit:Yubin Ji et al., Adv. Mat. 2024)
My trypophobia!
How about the ChatGPT rewrite that explains it a little better (though I have no idea if it’s accurate, as it’s ChatGPT and this isn’t my field):
Magnetic skyrmions are tiny, stable structures found in certain magnetic materials, and they hold great promise for future technologies like advanced electronics and data storage. They are fascinating because they behave like “magnetic whirlpools,” forming stable patterns that don’t easily break apart. Researchers have been exploring how to create and control these skyrmions because they could make electronic devices smaller, faster, and more efficient.
Recently, a team of scientists led by Yubin Ji at the Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science (KRISS) achieved something remarkable. They successfully created and moved these skyrmions in a thin magnetic material called Fe3GaTe2 (FGaT). What’s even more impressive is that their method required less energy than previous attempts involving thicker, three-dimensional materials. Their findings were published in the journal Advanced Materials.
To understand what makes skyrmions special, imagine the tiny magnetic properties of atoms, called spins, forming a stable, circular pattern. Changing this pattern is extremely difficult because it’s “topologically stable,” meaning it’s locked in place unless a significant amount of energy is applied. This stability makes skyrmions promising for technologies like spintronics, which aim to use the magnetic properties of materials to process and store information, potentially revolutionizing electronics.
The KRISS team used a clever approach to create and manipulate skyrmions. First, they applied electrical pulses and a magnetic field to the FGaT film to generate the skyrmions. Then, they used a brief electric current pulse lasting only 50 microseconds (a tiny fraction of a second) to move them. Remarkably, the skyrmions moved in the same direction as the flow of electrons, which means their motion can be precisely controlled.
Although practical applications of skyrmions are still in the distant future, this type of research lays the groundwork for breakthroughs in magnetic storage and spintronics. By understanding and controlling these tiny magnetic structures, scientists are paving the way for faster, more efficient technologies.
What a load of blah-blah.
To make a piece of hardware compute, it needs two things: a way to represent states, and operations that can be applied. This can be DRAM capacitors, flip-flops and logic gates, but we might as well be talking about analog voltage levels and linear analog circuitry.
Our motivation is to do more computation with a given amount of space and energy – that’s the optimization problem. Right now, we’re moving charges onto transistor gates, and a lot of them. It would be much nicer if we could encode bits with single atoms, electrons or whatever more abstract excitations of our physical system that are both low-energy YET stable against perturbations from the environment.
The latter point is what most of the quantum hype was and is all about: Can we find (quasi)particle systems that hold information long enough to be useful for computation? The spin property of electrons, electron vacancies, excitons, heck even that of nuclei can look useful, but all of them are terribly susceptible to interactions with their immediate enviornment. We’re talking picoseconds – nanoseconds for a defined state you put them in so as to encode information, to decay back into randomness.
That’s where Skyrmions come in. Where usual quantum systems require cryogenic temperatures (20 mK – 4 K), Skyrmions can exist at room temperature. Without first understanding their properties (nano-scale dimension, amount of energy to create / destroy) all that’s missing for them to be a practical candidate is that they’re easily and reliably generated on-chip and that despite their robustness they can be manipulated. One such way to manipulate them is translation, e.g. through electrical current.
Now read the article above again, hope that now it makes more sense :)
Now THAT was a great explanation. Thank you.
Sweeping in from nowhere to score, wielding the mighty hammer of +5 domain knowledge with an equally weighty modifier on non-technical communication skills…. Helge! crowd goes wild
And yet again ChatGPT shows its worthlessness when it comes to replacing humans in specialized fields…
But why
well, this is all turbo encabulator to me
I was about to say, great new technobabble. Be right back, I have to re-phase my self-flagellating skyrmionic encabulators
What happened to the comment more directly critical of the article than the ChatGPT one and the replies that were mostly in agreement?
Was it just report spammed?
Didn’t save the replies to it, but here’s that parent comment for anyone interested
https://web.archive.org/web/20241122032154/https://hackaday.com/2024/11/21/creating-and-control-of-magnetic-skyrmions-in-ferromagnetic-film-demonstrated/#comments
Deleting comments just because they are quite critical is not something I enjoy seeing.
Also, looks like hackaday has now fixed the comment counting bug that used to show if comments had been deleted. Good to know.
Maybe I’ll write a bot or something to archive hackaday comments in real-time. Would be a fun coding project.
I deleted the anonymous comment for being hostile and accusatory without adding anything useful to the discussion. If people want to discuss a topic here, that’s fine, but going 100% on snark and accusations doesn’t help anyone.
I feel you should just admit to yourself that you wrote a “bad” article instead of feeling attacked by people giving their honest opinion.
Deleting comments like this reflects poorly on you and hackaday.com IMHO.
The Streisand effect is a powerful force, especially among hackers.
If only each person were to introspect past their own inner walls, especially human beings, the world would be… i dunno, so more dull in a good way :)
The recent discussion isn’t so far in the past: https://hackaday.com/2024/10/12/if-you-cant-say-anything-nice/
No need to hunt down my interaction with it – as far as the scope of this comments section, I personally would have left the comment in. See Nathan’s archive link above where [Anonymous] claimed:
“[..] specific effort went to making it unapproachable to puff it [..]”
without adding to the topic, or substantiating that accusation (I don’t think it’s a matter of “feeling attacked” when it’s spelled out like that).
It doesn’t reflect kindly on the anonymous poster who probably would have realized that this hackaday article errs on the safe side by mostly reproducing the (necessarily) information-dense terminology used in the paper. Depending on how much prior knowledge one has, it can take many hours to gain a deeper understanding – and only then can one attempt to simplify the article.
This seems a lot like the bubble memory modules that TI came out in the early 80’s that i interfaced to when I was at Q1. A ‘massive’ 92K bits per module
Indeed, this reminds me mightily of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_memory of yore.
Also, if i read the article correctly, the “‘magnetic vortices’, forming statically stable solitons” had no properties like superposition of quantum states.
Thus, IMHO not a quantum computer component.
Thanks for pointing out bubble memory. I found https://hackaday.com/2020/04/19/magnetic-bubble-memory-farewell-tour/ and it looks delightful.
As for the nature of skyrmions, they’re still based on purely quantum mechanical properties (spin, exchange interaction). “Extending over length scales much larger than the interatomic spacing, they behave as large, classical objects, yet deep inside they are of quantum nature.” (https://www.cpfs.mpg.de/pcm/cu-skyrmions-Rosner)
The research on skyrmions goes way beyond my level of knowledge, so forgive me for referring you to the in-depth publication below.
“Colloquium: Quantum Properties and Functionalities of Magnetic Skyrmions”
https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.11427
When I come to HaD, I usually understand the topic of most articles, sometimes I know a little bit of the article , but still have a notion of what is goin on.
I have no idea about what this article is talking about :(
Read headline, read author (though I already knew from the headline), skipped to comments section, skipped article.
Thanks for your constructive criticism.