Skyrmion Creation and Annihilation by Electric Current Vorticity

Abstract

Motivated by the recent experiment done by Yu et al. [X. Z. Yu, et. al., Sci. Adv., 6, 25, eaaz9744 (2020)] on magnetic skyrmion creation and annihilation by electric currents in FeGe devices with a notch structure, we examine the interaction between the electric current vorticity near the notch and localized spins, and obtain three effects of the current vorticity on the localized spins. The first one is an effective Zeeman field induced by the current vorticity. This effective Zeeman field is responsible for skyrmion creation. The second effect is a vorticity-induced Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) interaction with the direction of the DM vector being parallel to the vorticity direction and is different from the vector of the intrinsic DM interaction. This vorticity-induced DM interaction makes the skyrmions distorted. The third effect is a spin current due to the gradient of the vorticity and the spin current drives the magnetic skyrmions far from the notch. Our theory opens a new path to design the magnetic textures by using structural settings.