Gate-Controlled Skyrmion Chirality

Charles-Elie Fillion , Johanna Fischer , Raj Kumar , Aymen Fassatoui , Stefania Pizzini , Laurent Ranno , Djoudi Ourdani , Mohamed Belmeguenai , Yves Roussigné , Salim-Mourad Chérif , Stéphane Auret , Isabelle Joumard , Olivier Boulle , Gilles Gaudin , Liliana Buda-Prejbeanu , Claire Baraduc , Hélène Béa (1)

1 SPINTEC - SPINtronique et TEchnologie des Composants

Magnetic skyrmions are localized chiral spin textures, which oer great promise to store and process information at the nanoscale. In the presence of asymmetric exchange interactions, their chirality, which governs their dynamics, is generally considered as an intrinsic parameter set during the sample deposition. In this work, we experimentally demonstrate that this key parameter can be controlled by a gate voltage. We observed that the current-induced skyrmion motion can be reversed by the application of a gate voltage. This local and dynamical reversal of the skyrmion chirality is due to a sign inversion of the interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction that we attribute to ionic migration of oxygen under gate voltage. Micromagnetic simulations show that the chirality reversal is a continuous transformation, in which the skyrmion is conserved. This gate-controlled chirality provides a local and dynamical degree of freedom, yielding new functionalities to skyrmion-based logic devices.

Domaines: Science des matériaux [cond-mat.mtrl-sci]

Charles-Elie Fillion, Johanna Fischer, Raj Kumar, Aymen Fassatoui, Stefania Pizzini, et al.. Gate-Controlled Skyrmion Chirality. 2022. ⟨hal-03617498v1⟩