Professor Kai Liu Heads Study that Discovers a New Key to Unlocking Winding Spins

Nanoscale magnets are widely used for information storage and increasingly find more applications in nanoelectronics because they are very efficient information carriers that do not require constant power feed. Energy consumption in such nanomagnets can be substantially lowered if their spins are arranged in certain winding configurations known as chiral spin textures. An international team led by Prof. Kai Liu has now discovered a new key that unlocks restricted access to such winding spins. They have found that chemisorbed oxygen on the surface of ferromagnetic films can induce significant Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interaction, which can stabilize chiral domain walls and magnetic skyrmions. The paper is published today in Science Advances.

Full article from Georgetown University College of Arts & Sciences can be found here.