Skyrmions at room temperature in magnetic multilayers

Magnetic skyrmions are arguably the smallest stable magnetic configuration in films, and therefore could be the ultimate magnetic storage bit. They have also triggered a wide interest due to the new fundamental phenomena related to their topology. Numerical simulations have shown that the interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI) can stabilize such skyrmions in nanoscale disks or tracks for a rather large range of DMI amplitudes for which the skyrmion can either be the ground state or metastable relative to the uniform state. Here, we demonstrate experimentally the presence of skyrmions in metallic multilayers structures engineered to exhibit a strong DMI interaction.