Skyrmion Formation Induced by Antiferromagnetic-enhanced Interfacial Dzyaloshinskii Moriya Interaction

Abstract: Ne\'el skyrmions originate from interfacial Dzyaloshinskii Moriya interaction (DMI). Recent studies have explored using ferromagnet to host Ne\'el skyrmions for device applications. However, challenges remain to reduce the size of skyrmion to near 10 nm. Amorphous rare-earth-transitional-metal ferrimagnets are attractive alternative materials to obtain ultrasmall skyrmions at room temperature. Their intrinsic perpendicular magnetic anisotropy and tunable magnetization provides a favorable environment for skyrmion stability. In this work, we employ atomistic stochastic Landau-Liftshitz-Gilbert (LLG) algorithm to investigate skyrmions in GdFe within the interfacial DMI model. Despite the rapid decay of DMI away from the interface, small skyrmions of near 10 nm are found in thick ~ 5 nm amorphous GdFe film at 300K. We have also considered three scenarios for the sign of DMI between Gd-Fe pair. It is revealed that antiferromagnetic coupling in the ferrimagnet plays an important role in enhancing the effect of interfacial DMI and to stabilize skyrmion. These results show that ferrimagnets and antiferromagnets with intrinsic antiferromagnetic couplings are appealing materials to host small skyrmions at room temperature, which is crucial to improve density and energy efficiency in skyrmion based devices.