Speaker
Description
Skyrmions are topologically protected spin textures that appear in certain chiral magnetic materials. One bulk chiral material in which skyrmions are observed is the multiferroic insulator Cu2OSeO3. In this talk I will present small angle neutron scattering (SANS) and magnetometry work studying skyrmion metastability in zinc-substituted Cu2OSeO3. This substitution dramatically increases the metastable lifetime of skyrmions, by a factor 50 with just 2.5% Zn. Furthermore, we can use SANS to measure the formation time of skyrmions out of the conical state when an electric field is applied to Zn substituted Cu2OSeO3. The temperature dependence of these formation times follow an Arrhenius law dependence, allowing us to extract an energy barrier for the formation of skyrmions of 1.57 eV.
