References
- Fert, Reyren, Cros, Nature Reviews, 2, 17031
A magnetic skyrmion is a local whirl of spin configuration in a magnetic material. The spins inside a skyrmion rotate progressively with a fixed chirality from the up direction at one edge to the down direction at the center, and then back to the up direction at the other edge. There are two typical types of magnetic skyrmions
- Néel type
- Bloch type These correspond to different symmetries of the interactions between spins, which can be due to the underlying crystal lattice or to the presence of an interface for example.
In most systems, the spin configuration of skyrmions is determined by chiral interactions of the Dzyaloshinkii-Moriya type. Even though other types of localized whirling magnetic textures, such as magnetic bubbles, can be stabalized without Dzyaloshinkii-Moriya interactions (DMI) (e.g. they can be stabilized by dipolar interactions), a crucial difference is that they do not have the defined chirality that is the basis of most properties of skyrmions.