https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/10/211006112630.htm

Strings, threads and braided structures can be seen everywhere in daily life, from shoelaces, to woollen pullovers, from plaits in a child's hair to the braided steel cables that are used to support countless bridges. These structures are also commonly seen in nature and can, for example, give plant fibres tensile or flexural strength. Physicists at Forschungszentrum Jülich, together with colleagues from Stockholm and Hefei, have discovered that such structures exist on the nanoscale in alloys of iron and the metalloid germanium.

These nanostrings are each made up of several skyrmions that are twisted together to a greater or lesser extent, rather like the strands of a rope. Each skyrmion itself consists of magnetic moments that point in different directions and together take the form of an elongated tiny vortex. An individual skyrmion strand has a diamater of less than one micrometre. The length of the magnetic structures is limited only by the thickness of the sample; they extend from one surface of the sample to the opposite surface.