Pattern formation in skyrmionic materials with anisotropic environments

International audienceMagnetic Skyrmions have attracted broad attention during recent years because they are regarded as promising candidates as bits of information in novel data storage devices. A broad range of theoretical and experimental investigations have been conducted with the consideration of axisymmetric Skyrmions in isotropic environments. However, one naturally observes a huge variety of anisotropic behavior in many experimentally relevant materials. In the present work, we investigate the influence of anisotropic environments onto the formation and behavior of the noncollinear spin states of skyrmionic materials by means of Monte Carlo calculations. We find skyrmionic textures which are far from having an axisymmetric shape. Furthermore, we show the possibility to employ periodic modulations of the environment to create skyrmionic tracks

Accommodation of Right-Wing Populist Rhetoric: Evidence From Parliamentary Speeches in Germany

We provide novel evidence on how right-wing (populist) rhetoric spreads. Using several thousand speeches from the German parliament, we show that exposure to politicians from the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) leads mainstream politicians to adopt a more distinctively right-wing populist language. We measure similarity to right-wing populist rhetoric via cosine similarity to both parliamentary speeches by the AfD and extremist speeches at far-right rallies, as well as using a populist dictionary method. To induce individual-level variation in exposure to AfD politicians, we exploit a quasi-exogenous allocation rule for committee members in the German parliament. Comparing a politician with the highest to one with the lowest relative AfD exposure increases the cosine similarity to right-wing populist speech by 0.1 of a standard deviation. Our results seem specific to right-wing populism and suggest strategic motives related to local electoral competition behind rhetorical changes among individual politicians