https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/06/180628131055.htm

"For a long time, the unique object for research in the field of chiral magnets was the magnetic skyrmion. We now provide a new object for investigation by researchers -- a chiral bobber -- which is characterized by a number of unique properties," says Dr. Nikolai Kiselev from Jülich's Peter Grünberg Institute (PGI-1). Three years ago, together with the institute's Director Prof. Stefan Blügel and other collaborators, they predicted the existence of this new class of magnetic structures theoretically. Now, researchers from the Ernst Ruska-Centre for Microscopy and Spectroscopy with Electrons (Director Prof. Rafal E. Dunin-Borkowski and his colleagues) have succeeded in demonstrating the existence of chiral bobbers in a real material experimentally.

The stability of magnetic structures such as skyrmions is related to a property of the material known as chirality. Just as a right hand cannot be converted into a left hand for reasons of symmetry, right-handed and left-handed magnetic structures cannot be converted into one another. Furthermore, both skyrmions and the newly-discovered chiral bobbers are very small, with diameters of typically only a few tens of nanometers. Therefore, they can in principle be used to pack data very densely on a memory chip. However, their small size makes their observation highly challenging. "The visualization of magnetic texture on such a small scale requires special state-of-the-art techniques that are accessible in only a few laboratories worldwide," explains Rafal Dunin-Borkowski.