Skyrmions—tiny magnetic whirls that appear in certain
combinations of materials—are considered promising information
carriers for future data storage. A research team from RWTH Aachen
University, Kiel University, and the University of Iceland has
discovered that these magnetic nano-knots untie themselves in two
distinct ways. Using a magnetic field, the probability to succeed
in untying can be varied by up to a factor of 10,000. This insight
might be groundbreaking for future information processing with
skyrmions. The research has now been published in Nature
Physics.
