A tailor-made magnetic vortex: An HZDR team takes a closer look at a special kind of quasiparticle - Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, HZDR

Skyrmions are microscopic magnetic vortices that can form in certain materials. First detected in 2009, they are of interest to research because they could be harnessed for new forms of data storage. As theoreticians had predicted, there are also so called antiskyrmions, which were eventually discovered ten years after skyrmions. Researchers from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids, the Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Materials Research Dresden, and the University of South Florida used an ion beam saw and sophisticated measurement techniques to get to the bottom of this complex phenomenon, as they report in the journal Communications Materials (https://doi.org/10.1038/s43246-022-00323-6).