Data centres are giant, power-hungry warehouses of computers, and the magnetic materials inside them are being redesigned to cut their energy use in half. This project aims to create a new class of material—a "multi-skyrmion material"—by layering ferroelectric and ferromagnetic films so that nanoscale magnetic whirls (skyrmions) and polar whirls coexist and couple at their interface. Currently, skyrmions show promise for ultra-efficient data storage and logic, but controlling them with electric fields rather than electric currents would eliminate wasteful heat. The researchers will fabricate these hybrid structures and test whether an electric field can create and drive coupled skyrmion pairs. If successful, this fundamental science could replace the energy-intensive transistors and magnetic memory in data centres with devices that switch using almost no power. The work is exploratory—no prototype exists—but similar fundamental research on skyrmions and ferroelectrics has already led to new types of racetrack memory and low-power logic. The international collaboration also trains early-career researchers in advanced fabrication and characterisation techniques, building skills for future energy-efficient computing.
View original technical description
The ever-increasing energy consumption of data centres presents a large-scale global research challenge: how to fundamentally change the computing hardware inside such centres so that it runs more efficiently, with less waste heat? Magnetic materials underpin this hardware and combining them with ferroelectrics promises a scalable and energy-efficient technology. Here we will combine ferroelectric (FE) superlattices and ferromagnetic (FM) multilayers to create, for the first time, a multi-skyrmion material, in which magnetic-polar skyrmion pairs can be created and driven with an electric field. Skyrmions are nanoscale whirls in the order parameter in FE or FM materials and show great promise for data storage and computing applications. A multi-skyrmion material where FE and FM skyrmions are coupled at an interface holds the key to energy efficient devices. This project supports two UN sustainable development goals. (1) Responsible consumption and production: turning the tide on the rising energy consumption of data centres. (2) Industry, innovation and infrastructure: generating employment and income by exploiting multi-skyrmion materials for the information and communication technologies of the future. Our team is comprised of experts in magnetic skyrmions, ferroelectric materials and FE-FM coupling and brings together complementary experimental techniques across groups at the Universities of Leeds and Nagoya to prepare and characterise multi-skyrmion materials. At the research level, the challenge is to create the ferroelectric-ferromagnetic heterostructure in which the two types of skyrmion, polar and magnetic, co-exist, and to test for the coupling between them. The international nature of this project will provide early career researchers with opportunities to travel between the UK and Japanese partners and share knowledge and learn complementary techniques. Benefits are likely not only in terms of fundamental knowledge but also the technical skills for the researchers involved and the experimental techniques that will be developed for the fabrication and characterisation of multi-skyrmions.
Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.
Is something wrong? Let us know