Screw Dislocations in Chiral Magnets

Expanding the Horizons of Machine Learning in Nanomaterials to Chiral Nanostructures

Machine learning holds significant research potential in the field of nanotechnology, enabling nanomaterial structure and property predictions, facilitating materials design and discovery, and reducing the need for time-consuming and labor-intensive experiments and simulations. In contrast to their achiral counterparts, the application of machine learning for chiral nanomaterials is still in its infancy, with a limited number of publications to date. This is despite the great potential of machine learning to advance the development of new sustainable chiral materials with high values of optical activity, circularly polarized luminescence, and enantioselectivity, as well as for the analysis of structural chirality by electron microscopy. In this review, an analysis of machine learning methods used for studying achiral nanomaterials is provided, subsequently offering guidance on adapting and extending this work to chiral nanomaterials. An overview of chiral nanomaterials within the framework of synthesis-structure-property-application relationships is presented and insights on how to leverage machine learning for the study of these highly complex relationships are provided. Some key recent publications are reviewed and discussed on the application of machine learning for chiral nanomaterials. Finally, the review captures the key achievements, ongoing challenges, and the prospective outlook for this very important research field.

Current-Induced Creation of Topological Vortex Rings in a Magnetic Nanocylinder

Vortex rings are ubiquitous topological structures in nature. In solid magnetic systems, their formation leads to intriguing physical phenomena and potential device applications. However, realizing these topological magnetic vortex rings and manipulating their topology on demand have still been challenging. Here, we theoretically show that topological vortex rings can be created by a current pulse in a chiral magnetic nanocylinder with a trench structure. The creation process involves the formation of a vortex ring street, i.e., a chain of magnetic vortex rings with an alternative linking manner. The created vortex rings can be bounded with monopole-antimonopole pairs and possess a rich and controllable linking topology (e.g., Hopf link and Solomon link), which is determined by the duration and amplitude of the current pulse. Our proposal paves the way for the realization and manipulation of diverse three-dimensional (3D) topological spin textures and could catalyze the development of 3D spintronic devices.

Hopfion rings in a cubic chiral magnet

Magnetic skyrmions and hopfions are topological solitons1-well-localized field configurations that have gained considerable attention over the past decade owing to their unique particle-like properties, which make them promising objects for spintronic applications. Skyrmions2,3 are two-dimensional solitons resembling vortex-like string structures that can penetrate an entire sample. Hopfions4-9 are three-dimensional solitons confined within a magnetic sample volume and can be considered as closed twisted skyrmion strings that take the shape of a ring in the simplest case. Despite extensive research on magnetic skyrmions, the direct observation of magnetic hopfions is challenging10 and has only been reported in a synthetic material11. Here we present direct observations of hopfions in crystals. In our experiment, we use transmission electron microscopy to observe hopfions forming coupled states with skyrmion strings in B20-type FeGe plates. We provide a protocol for nucleating such hopfion rings, which we verify using Lorentz imaging and electron holography. Our results are highly reproducible and in full agreement with micromagnetic simulations. We provide a unified skyrmion-hopfion homotopy classification and offer insight into the diversity of topological solitons in three-dimensional chiral magnets.

Instability of Magnetic Skyrmion Strings Induced by Longitudinal Spin Currents

It is well established that spin-transfer torques exerted by in-plane spin currents give rise to a motion of magnetic skyrmions resulting in a skyrmion Hall effect. In films of finite thickness or in three-dimensional bulk samples the skyrmions extend in the third direction forming a string. We demonstrate that a spin current flowing longitudinally along the skyrmion string instead induces a Goldstone spin wave instability. Our analytical results are confirmed by micromagnetic simulations of both a single string as well as string lattices, suggesting that the instability eventually breaks the strings. A longitudinal current is thus able to melt the skyrmion string lattice via a nonequilibrium phase transition. For films of finite thickness or in the presence of disorder a threshold current will be required, and we estimate the latter assuming weak collective pinning.

Nucleation and Stability of Toron Chains in Non-Centrosymmetric Magnetic Nanowires

This work analyzes the magnetic configurations of cylindrical nanowires with a bulk Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction and easy-plane anisotropy. We show that this system allows the nucleation of a metastable toron chain even when no out-of-plane anisotropy exists in the nanowire's top and bottom surfaces, as usually required. The number of nucleated torons depends on the nanowire length and the strength of an external magnetic field applied to the system. The size of each toron depends on the fundamental magnetic interactions and can be controlled by external stimuli, allowing the use of these magnetic textures as information carriers or nano-oscillator elements. Our results evidence that the topology and structure of the torons yield a wide variety of behaviors, revealing the complex nature of these topological textures, which should present an exciting interaction dynamic, depending on the initial conditions.