Journal
NEW JOURNAL OF PHYSICS
Volume 22, Issue 8, Pages -Publisher
IOP PUBLISHING LTD
DOI: 10.1088/1367-2630/ab9f6d
Keywords
skyrmion; tunneling; lifetime; instanton
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Funding
- Icelandic Research Fund
- Research Fund of the University of Iceland
- Russian Foundation of Basic Research [RFBR 19-32-90048]
- Foundation for the Advancement of Theoretical Physics and Mathematics 'BASIS' [19-1-1-12-(1,2,3)]
- Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
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Magnetic skyrmions are nano-scale magnetic states that could be used in various spintronics devices. A central issue is the mechanism and rate of various possible annihilation processes and the lifetime of metastable skyrmions. While most studies have focused on classical over-the-barrier mechanism for annihilation, it is also possible that quantum mechanical tunneling through the energy barrier takes place. Calculations of the lifetime of magnetic skyrmions in a two-dimensional lattice are presented and the rate of tunneling compared with the classical annihilation rate. A remarkably strong variation in the onset temperature for tunneling and the lifetime of the skyrmion is found as a function of the values of parameters in the extended Heisenberg Hamiltonian, i.e. the out-of-plane anisotropy, Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction and applied magnetic field. Materials parameters and conditions are identified where the onset of tunneling could be observed on a laboratory time scale. In particular, it is predicted that skyrmion tunneling could be observed in the PdFe/Ir(111) system when an external magnetic field on the order of 6Tis applied.
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