Computing with Magnetic Skyrmions

Solitonic magnetic excitations such as skyrmions embody the promise of potentially compact, high density, ultrafast, all-electronic, low-energy devices. I will discuss skyrmionics in the context of the overall solid-state memory landscape and show how their size, stability, and mobility can be controlled by material engineering of saturation magnetization in nearly compensated ferrimagnets, damping in Heuslers and Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya in alloyed heavy metal under-layers with d-orbital alignment [1]. Furthermore, geometrical parameters such as film thickness, defect density, and notches can be used to tune skyrmion properties, such as their size, stability and lifetime. Successful engineering of individual skyrmions - in effect, small mobile magnets, can usher in unique applications such as temporal state machines, capitalizing on their near ballistic current-velocity relation to map temporal data to spatial data without any intervening domain conversion costs.