Increasing skyrmion lattice stability: theory and experiment

Magnetic skyrmions are vortices of spins, considered to be topologically protected against perturbations, and envisaged as very possible next-generation information carriers due to their nanoscale size. In chiral ferromagnets they form a two-dimensional hexagonal array - the skyrmion lattice. A key challenge is that bulk skyrmions have been restricted so far to a tiny region in the temperature-field phase diagram. In this work we address theoretically the stability of the skyrmion lattice. We demonstrate that tuning anisotropy can lead to dramatic (20 times) enhancement of the skyrmion phase volume, which has been recently revealed in our experiment.