Robust metastable skyrmions with tunable size in the chiral magnet FePtMo3 N

Abstract

The synthesis of new materials that can host magnetic skyrmions and their thorough experimental and theoretical characterization are essential for future technological applications. The β-Mn-type compound FePtMo3N is one such novel material that belongs to the chiral space group P4132, where the antisymmetric Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction is allowed due to the absence of inversion symmetry. We report the results of small-angle neutron scattering (SANS) measurements of FePtMo3N and demonstrate that its magnetic ground state is a long-period spin helix with a Curie temperature of 222 K. The magnetic field-induced redistribution of the SANS intensity showed that the helical structure transforms to a lattice of skyrmions at ∼13 mT at temperatures just below TC. Our key observation is that the skyrmion state in FePtMo3N is robust against field cooling down to the lowest temperatures. Moreover, once the metastable state is prepared by field cooling, the skyrmion lattice exists even in zero field. Furthermore, we show that the skyrmion size in FePtMo3N exhibits high sensitivity to the sample temperature and can be continuously tuned between 120 and 210 nm. This offers different prospects in the control of topological properties of chiral magnets. © 2020 authors. Published by the American Physical Society.