Argonne National Laboratory

Research Highlight | Materials Science

Heated exchange over magnetism
In a study published in ACS Photonics, researchers found that integrating rare-earth ion molecular complexes with photonic structures could be a viable approach for the effective tuning of their optical properties.
Left panel: Lorentz TEM image of Néel skyrmion lattice at 180 K. Upper inset shows magnetic induction map and the bottom inset defines position and size of individual skyrmions. Right panel: thermal hysteresis of skyrmion lattice order.

Scientific Achievement

Control of order in magnetic skyrmion lattices using temperature and applied magnetic field.

Significance and Impact

Manipulating skyrmion size and large-scale lattice order enables fundamental understanding of 2D phase transitions in a magnetic-quasiparticle system and provides insights into potential applications in low-power skyrmionic computing devices.

Research Details

  • Néel skyrmion lattices were observed in van der Waals Fe3GeTe2 via in-situ cryo-Lorentz transmission electron microscopy.
  • Machine learning enabled image analysis allowed for the quantitative study of more than 600,000 skyrmions.
  • Combining experiments with an analytical model allowed determination of the energy landscape governing their behavior.

DOI: 10.1021/acsphotonics.2c00289

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