Design of 2D Skyrmionic Metamaterial Through Controlled Assembly

Despite extensive research on magnetic skyrmions and antiskyrmions, a significant challenge remains in crafting nontrivial high-order skyrmionic textures with varying, or even tailor-made, topologies. We address this challenge, by focusing on a construction pathway of skyrmionics metamaterial within a monolayer thin film and suggest several promising lattice-like, flakes-like, and cell-like skyrmionic metamaterials that are surprisingly stable. Central to our approach is the concept of 'simulated controlled assembly', in short, a protocol inspired by 'click chemistry' that allows for positioning topological magnetic structures where one likes, and then allowing for energy minimization to elucidate the stability. Utilizing high-throughput atomistic-spin-dynamic (ASD) simulations alongside state-of-the-art AI-driven tools, we have isolated skyrmions (topological charge Q=1), antiskyrmions (Q=-1), and skyrmionium (Q=0). These entities serve as foundational 'skyrmionic building blocks' to forming reported intricate textures. In this work, two key contributions are introduced to the field of skyrmionic systems. First, we present a novel method for integrating control assembly protocols for the stabilization and investigation of topological magnets, which marks a significant advancement in the ability to explore new skyrmionic textures. Second, we report on the discovery of skyrmionic metamaterials, which shows a plethora of complex topologies that are possible to investigate theoretically and experimentally.

Finding metastable skyrmionic structures via a metaheuristic perturbation-driven neural network

Topological magnetic textures observed in experiments can, in principle, be predicted by theoretical calculations and numerical simulations. However, such calculations are, in general, hampered by difficulties in distinguishing between local and global energy minima. This becomes particularly problematic for magnetic materials that allow for a multitude of topological charges. Finding solutions to such problems by means of classical numerical methods can be challenging because either a good initial guess or a gigantic amount of random sampling is required. In this study, we demonstrate an efficient way to identify those metastable configurations by leveraging the power of gradient descent-based optimization within the framework of a feedforward neural network combined with a heuristic meta-search, which is driven by a random perturbation of the neural network's input. We exemplify the power of the method by an analysis of the Pd/Fe/Ir(111) system, an experimentally well characterized system.