Gate-Controlled Skyrmion Chirality

Abstract

Magnetic skyrmions are localized chiral spin textures, which offer great promise to store and process information at the nanoscale. In the presence of asymmetric exchange interactions, their chirality, which governs their dynamics, is generally considered as an intrinsic parameter set during the sample deposition. In this work, we experimentally demonstrate that this key parameter can be controlled by a gate voltage. We observed that the current-induced skyrmion motion can be reversed by the application of a gate voltage. This local and dynamical reversal of the skyrmion chirality is due to a sign inversion of the interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction that we attribute to ionic migration of oxygen under gate voltage. Micromagnetic simulations show that the chirality reversal is a continuous transformation, in which the skyrmion is conserved. This gate-controlled chirality provides a local and dynamical degree of freedom, yielding new functionalities to skyrmion-based logic devices.Comment: 4 figure