Credit: Image courtesy of Argonne National Laboratory
The motion of a magnetic skyrmion—stable magnetic island with a core surrounded by a symmetric arrangement of twisting magnetic spins (top) —was controlled by using short pulses of electric current. Its trajectory (blue arrow at the bottom) along a thin flat wire (black) was measured by taking an image of the wire after each pulse. The skyrmion, which shows up as a white dot in the images, moves diagonally from one edge of the flat wire (top) to the other edge (bottom).