Targeted Writing and Deleting of Magnetic Skyrmions in Two-Terminal Nanowire Devices

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a simple, scalable method for writing and deleting magnetic skyrmions in two-terminal nanowire devices using electrical pulses, leveraging Joule heating and Oersted fields.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, straightforward approach for skyrmion control in simple device architectures, avoiding complex fabrication or tailored inputs.

Findings

Skyrmions can be written and deleted via electrical pulses.

Joule heating and Oersted fields enable skyrmion manipulation.

The method offers spatial and temporal selectivity.

Abstract

Controllable writing and deleting of nanoscale magnetic skyrmions are key requirements for their use as information carriers for next-generation memory and computing technologies. While several schemes have been proposed, they require complex fabrication techniques or precisely tailored electrical inputs, which limits their long-term scalability. Here we demonstrate an alternative approach for writing and deleting skyrmions using conventional electrical pulses within a simple, two-terminal wire geometry. X-ray microscopy experiments and micromagnetic simulations establish the observed skyrmion creation and annihilation as arising from Joule heating and Oersted field effects of the current pulses, respectively. The unique characteristics of these writing and deleting schemes, such as spatial and temporal selectivity, together with the simplicity of the 2-terminal device architecture, provide a flexible and scalable route to the viable applications of skyrmions.