Effect of random anisotropy in stabilization of topological chiral textures

Abstract

Ever increasing demand of skyrmion manipulation in nanodevices has brought up interesting research to 8 understand the stabilization of these topologically protected chiral structures. To understand the actual shape 9 and size of skyrmion observed experimentally, we have performed micromagnetic simulations to investigate 10 skyrmion stabilization in presence of random anisotropy in magnetic thin film system. Previous experimental 11 reports of skyrmion imaging in thin films depicts that the skyrmion shape is not perfectly circular. Here we 12 show via simulations that the shape of a skyrmion can get distorted due to the presence of different local 13 anisotropy energy. The values of uniaxial anisotropy constant (Ku) and random aniostropy constant (Kr) 14 are varied to understand the change in shape and size of a skyrmion and an antiskyrmion stabilized in a 15 square magnetic nanoelement. The skyrmion shape gets distorted and the size gets constant for high random 16 anisotropy energy in the system.