Creation of skyrmions and antiskyrmions by local heating

Heating a system usually increases entropy and destroys order. However, there are also cases where heating gives a system the energy to overcome the potential barrier to reach a state with a nontrivial ordered pattern. Whether heating can manipulate the topological nature of the system is especially important. Here, we theoretically show by microsimulation that local heating can create topological magnetic textures, skyrmions, in a ferromagnetic background of chiral magnets and dipolar magnets. The resulting states depend sharply on intensity and spot size of heating, as well as the interaction to stabilize the skyrmions. Typically, the creation process is completed within 0.1 ns and 10 nm at the shortest time and smallest size, and these values can be longer and larger according to the choice of system. This finding will lead to the creation of skyrmions at will, which constitutes an important step towards their application to memory devices.