Research paper in Advanced Materials among the top 10% most downloaded articles

A research paper by Stuart Parkin and his department, published in Advanced Materials, is among the top 10% most downloaded articles.

The paper titled “Magnetic Skyrmions in a Thickness Tunable 2D Ferromagnet from a Defect Driven Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya Interaction” in the prestigious journal Advanced Materials has received enough downloads to rank in the top 10% of published articles. This recognition is a confirmation of the relevance and appreciation of the work within the community.

According to the journal’s publisher, Parkin’s research published between January 2022 and December 2022 received some of the most downloads in 12 months following online publication. His research “generated immediate impact and helped to raise the visibility of Advanced Materials”. In recognition of his work, the publisher awarded Parkin with a certificate of achievement.

Abstract

There is considerable interest in van der Waals (vdW) materials as potential hosts for chiral skyrmionic spin textures. Of particular interest is the ferromagnetic, metallic compound Fe₃GeTe₂ (FGT), which has a comparatively high Curie temperature (150–220 K). Several recent studies have reported the observation of chiral Néel skyrmions in this compound, which is inconsistent with its presumed centrosymmetric structure. Here the observation of Néel type skyrmions in single crystals of FGT via Lorentz transmission electron microscopy (LTEM) is reported. It is shown from detailed X-ray diffraction structure analysis that FGT lacks an inversion symmetry as a result of an asymmetric distribution of Fe vacancies. This vacancy-induced breaking of the inversion symmetry of this compound is a surprising and novel observation and is a prerequisite for a Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya vector exchange interaction which accounts for the chiral Néel skyrmion phase. This phenomenon is likely to be common to many 2D vdW materials and suggests a path to the preparation of many such acentric compounds. Furthermore, it is found that the skyrmion size in FGT is strongly dependent on its thickness: the skyrmion size increases from ≈100 to ≈750 nm as the thickness of the lamella is increased from ≈90 nm to ≈2 µm. This extreme size tunability is a feature common to many low symmetry ferro- and ferri-magnetic compounds.