Heart-shaped skyrmions in an antiskyrmion hosting material

Several experimental papers have demonstrated that a material with an inversion symmetry that supports antiskyrmions can also host elliptically-deformed skyrmions [1] [2]. It can also be shown theoretically that these elliptical skyrmions can be nucleated from the stripe domain state or labrinyth domain state using a magnetic force microscope tip [3]. The skyrmions will elongate along a given direction based on their chirality. The aforementioned material also supports bubble states of topological charge Q= 0. Recent theoretical and numerical research suggests that this material also supports a "heart-shaped" skyrmion of topological charge Q= 1 [4]. This "heart-shaped" skyrmion visually appears to be a bound state of two skyrmions of topological charge Q=1 and an antiskyrmion of topological charge Q= -1. This heart-shaped skyrmion can exist as a metastable state or be nucleated from the topologically trivial bubble state if the bubble state is manipulated by a pair of magnetic force microscope tips while a strong oblique field is applied, producing both a heart-shaped skyrmion and an antiskyrmion. If one of the tips is removed, the antiskyrmion can be destroyed, leaving behind the heart-shaped skyrmion.

[1] Jena J., Göbel B., Ma T., Kumar V., Saha R., Mertig I., Felser C., Parkin S.S.P., Elliptical Bloch skyrmion chiral twins in an antiskyrmion system, Nat. Comms., 11 (2020), p. 1115.

[2] Peng L., Takagi R., Koshibae W., Shibata K., Nakajima K., Arima T., Nagaosa N., Seki S., Yu X., Tokura Y., Controlled transformation of skyrmions and antiskyrmions in a non-centrosymmetric magnet, Nature Nanotechnol., 15 (2020), pp. 181-186.

[3] D. Capic, Elliptical skyrmions: Theory and nucleation by a magnetic tip in an antiskyrmion-hosting material, Journal of Magnetism and Magnetic Materials, 563, (2022),169866.

[4] D. Capic, Heart-shaped skyrmions in an antiskyrmion hosting material, in progress.