Submission Date

5-15-2026

Document Type

Paper

Department

Physics & Astronomy

Adviser

Thomas Carroll

Committee Member

Thomas Carroll

Committee Member

Lew Riley

Department Chair

Thomas Carroll

External Reviewer

Xuemei Cheng

Distinguished Honors

This paper has met the requirements for Distinguished Honors.

Project Description

Competing magnetic interactions can stabilize smooth magnetization textures and can be characterized by a topological winding number. A specific spin configuration/texture, spatially localized within a two-dimensional plane, is commonly known as a skyrmion. On the classical level, the significance of skyrmions for condensed matter physics and their potential for applications, ranging from spintronic devices to qubits, has been intensely investigated in recent years. This thesis focuses on antiferromagnetically (AF) coupled Neel-type magnetic skyrmions, which are comprised of two skyrmions with opposite topological charges, yielding a net topological charge of 0. This configuration results in the cancellation of their respective Magnus forces, thereby eliminating the unwanted transverse motion from the Skyrmion Hall Effect. The goal of this work was to investigate field driven skyrmion core shrinkage observed in PEEM images using micromagnetic simulations. To understand the mechanism behind the size reduction of the smaller skyrmion bubbles, micromagnetic simulations were performed for the [Co/Gd/Pt]10 sample. Our simulation results showed skyrmion core shrinkage for the skyrmion bubbles chosen when subject to an in-plane magnetic field, which is in agreement with the PEEM results. This thesis also discusses the methods of Mumax3, a GPU-accelerated micromagnetic simulation used to simulate the [Co/Gd/Pt]10 thin film, the interactions responsible for skyrmion formation, and a brief discussion on VAMPIRE and its viability as an atomistic simulation software.

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