Skyrmions and Electric Currents in Metallic Materials

Abstract

In metallic materials, non-collinear or non-coplanar spin textures such as skyrmions, helices or domain walls give rise to intriguing phenomena via coupling to conduction electrons. In this chapter, we introduce the emergent electromagnetic fields generated by a skyrmion spin texture acting on conduction electrons. These cause the topological Hall effect and the electric-current-driven motion of skyrmions with a significantly small threshold current density jc of 105–106 A/m2, which is five or six orders of magnitude smaller than that of a ferromagnetic domain wall and a helical magnetic structure.