Together with colleagues, Liangzi Deng (left) and Paul Chu (right) at the University of Houston have reported the discovery of a new material able to maintain its skyrmion properties at room temperature when exposed to high pressures.
Together with colleagues, Liangzi Deng (left) and Paul Chu (right) at the University of Houston have reported the discovery of a new material able to maintain its skyrmion properties at room temperature when exposed to high pressures.

The demands for data storage and processing have grown exponentially as the world becomes increasingly connected, emphasizing the need for new materials capable of more efficient data storage and data processing.

An international team of researchers, led by physicist Paul Ching-Wu Chu, founding director of the Texas Center for Superconductivity at the University of Houston, has revealed a new compound capable of maintaining its skyrmion properties at room temperature when exposed to high pressures. The results, reported in a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also suggest the potential for using chemical pressure to maintain these skyrmion properties at ambient pressure, offering promise for commercial applications.

A skyrmion is the smallest possible perturbation to a uniform magnet, a point-like region of reversed magnetization surrounded by a whirling twist of spins. These extremely small regions, along with the possibility of moving them using very little electrical current, make the materials hosting them promising candidates for high-density information storage.

But the skyrmion state normally exists only at a very low and narrow temperature range. For example, in the copper oxyselenide compound Chu and his colleagues studied, the skyrmion state normally exists only within a narrow temperature range of about 3K, between 55K and 58.5K (-360.7°F and -354.4°F), making it impractical for most applications.

But Chu and his team have now been able to dramatically extend the temperature range at which the skyrmion state exists in the copper oxyselenide compound to 300K (80°F), near room temperature, by simply applying pressure. First author Liangzi Deng, a researcher at the Texas Center for Superconductivity, said they successfully detected the skyrmion state at room temperature under 8 gigapascals (GPa) of pressure, using a special technique he and his colleagues developed.

Chu said they also found that the copper oxyselenide compound undergoes different structural-phase transitions with increasing pressure, suggesting the possibility that the skyrmion state is more ubiquitous than previously thought.

"Our results suggest the insensitivity of the skyrmions to the underlying crystal lattices. More skyrmion material may be found in other compounds as well," he said.

This work suggests that the pressure required to maintain the skyrmion state in the copper oxyselenide compound could be replicated chemically, allowing it to work under ambient pressure, another important requirement for potential commercial applications. That has some analogies to work Chu and his colleagues did with high-temperature superconductivity back in the 1980s, where they stabilized high-temperature superconductivity in YBCO (yttrium, barium, copper and oxygen) by replacing ions in the compound with smaller isovalent ions.

This story is adapted from material from the University of Houston, with editorial changes made by Materials Today. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of Elsevier. Link to original source.