Magnetic skyrmion field-effect transistors

Abstract

Magnetic skyrmions are of considerable interest for low-power memory and logic devices because of high speed at low current and high stability due to topological protection. We propose a skyrmion field-effect transistor based on a gate-controlled Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction. A key working principle of the proposed skyrmion field-effect transistor is a large transverse motion of skyrmions, caused by an effective equilibrium dampinglike spin-orbit torque due to spatially inhomogeneous Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction. This large transverse motion can be categorized as the skyrmion Hall effect but has been unrecognized previously. The proposed device is capable of performing multibit operation and Boolean functions and thus is expected to serve as a low-power logic device based on magnetic solitons.