Creation and annihilation of artificial magnetic skyrmions with the electric field

Abstract

Recent theory and experiments show that artificial magnetic skyrmions can be stabilized at room temperature without the need of the external magnetic field, casting strong potentials for the device applications. In this work, we study the electric field manipulation of artificial magnetic skyrmions imprinted by Co disks on CoPt multilayers utilizing the micromagnetic simulations. We find that the reversible annihilation and creation of skyrmions can be realized with the electric field via the strain mediated magnetoelastic coupling. In addition, we also demonstrate controllable manipulation of individual skyrmion, which opens a new platform for constructing magnetic-field-free and low-energy-dissipation skyrmion-based media.