Magnetic skyrmions (Sks), a new type of magnetic quasi-particles, are fundamentally as well as technologically interesting due to their high stability against annihilation, their small size, and their outstanding transport properties. Accordingly, if they are used to encode information (e.g., one Sk = one bit), they may allow the design of very fast magnetic data storage and processing devices, with high information density and low power consumption. Particularly promising is the stabilization of skyrmions in epitaxial multilayer system, where it seems possible to obtain a skyrmionic ground state at room temperature, without the requirement of any external magnetic field, a key requirement for an actual device.

This project is focused on the development of epitaxial magnetic multilayers hosting ro0m-temperature magnetic skyrmions on top of an insulating single crystal substrates , which will allow the study of the topology as well as of the transport properties of such skyrmionic systems.