April

Picture of the Month - April 2018

Here you see current insights into the research of the LaMa groups. A collection of the former pictures can be found in the Gallery.

Ab initio characterisation of skyrmion induced effects in MTJs

Magnetic skyrmions are swirl like spin structures in an otherwise purely collinear environment.

When it comes to technological applications of skyrmions, the main functionalities one has to provide in order to build practical devices include the creation and deletion, transport, and reading of skyrmions.
The main focus of our research is the reading of skyrmions via magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs) in which two conducting leads are divided by a thin insulating layer.
We calculate the transmission function which is influenced by several effects such as standard TMR but also non-collinear effects which arise from the change of the magnetization direction from atom to atom for various configurations.
As our tool of choice we use the Keldysh-formalism operating with the non-equilibrium Green‘s function (NEGF) implemented in our KKR code in order to get an accurate description of the energy dependent transmission through the tunneling barrier.

This picture was submitted by Jonas F. Schäfer, group of Prof. Dr. Christian Heiliger.