An international team of researchers has discovered a way to create and observe room-temperature polar skyrmions. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes creating the polar skyrmions and their observations. Pavlo Zubko, with the London Centre for Nanotechnology, has published a News and Views piece on the work done by the team in the same journal issue.
Zubko describes skyrmions as "tiny whorls of magnetic moments," and notes that a lot of research has been done with them because they are very useful in data storage applications. But he also notes that finding electrical versions of skyrmions has been a difficult journey. That may change, however, as the researchers with this new effort report a way to create and observe at least one kind of electrically based skyrmion—the polar skyrmion.
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