Abstract:
An appealing class of non-collinear spin textures, i.e., chiral domain wall, cycloidal spin spiral and Néel-type skyrmion etc., has been recently observed in magnetic films and multilayers on heavy metal substrates due to the lack of spatial inversion symmetry and sizable interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) interaction. In particular, the topologically nontrivial magnetic skyrmions have received an intensive amount of interest in terms of their thrilling perspectives for the future application of magnetic information technology. Within the scope of present studies, the spin-polarized scanning tunneling microscopy (SP-STM) technique provides an ideal tool to spatially resolve these chiral spin structures down to the scale of atomic level. In addition, writing and deleting of individual magnetic skyrmions can be achieved in a controllable fashion by using local electric fields between STM tip and sample.