The project at a glance
The constantly increasing energy consumption associated with the functioning of micro-electronic devices calls for the design of more energy efficient technologies. While semiconductor technologies have reached their intrinsic limitations, spintronics offers a new path towards the design of memory and logic devices with high density and low power consumption. However, present spintronic devices such as magnetic-RAMs still suffer from high current density requirements. Magnetic skyrmions (shown below), a new type of magnetic quasi-particles, are fundamentally as well as technologically interesting due to their high stability against annihilation, their potential small size, and their outstanding transport properties. Accordingly, if they are used to encode information (e.g., one skyrmion = one bit), they may allow the design of very fast magnetic data storage and processing devices, with high information density and low power consumption. Particularly promising is the stabilization of skyrmions in multilayer systems, where it seems possible to stabilize magnetic skyrmions at room temperature without any external magnetic field, a key requirement for an actual device. This project is focused on the development of epitaxial magnetic multilayers hosting room-temperature magnetic skyrmions with tailored topological and transport properties. The two main experimental techniques involved in the study are spin-polarized low energy electron microscopy (SPLEEM) and spin-polarized scanning tunneling microscopy (SP-STM).