Creation and motion of antiferromagnetic skyrmions by edge manipulation

Magnetic racetrack architectures that use topological magnetic particles to store information are one of the most promising concepts for future storage applications. Antiferromagnetic racetracks are particularly appealing as they are not susceptible to external magnetic fields. State-of-the-art racetracks use magnetic fields, spin-transfer, and spin–orbit torques caused by electric currents to move the bits across the entire circuit. However, the application of currents in many antiferromagnetic racetracks is limited because many of them are insulating. Recently, however, a concept for ferromagnetic racetrack memories that are free of global driving forces has been proposed. It has been demonstrated that various topological entities can be generated and transported over long distances solely through local magnetization rotation at the sample boundaries, independent of global driving forces. Here, we demonstrate that the local rotation of magnetization at the boundary of an antiferromagnetic sample can be exploited in racetracks to efficiently generate and transmit antiferromagnetic skyrmions. Additionally, we demonstrate that local switching of staggered magnetization at the edge of an antiferromagnetic racetrack can be even more successful than the rotational procedure. A comparison of ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic processing of skyrmionic bits, together with energy considerations, shows that this procedure is fairly efficient in antiferromagnets.