Andrew and Erna Viterbi Department of Electrical Engineering, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, 3200003 Haifa, Israel.
Faculty of Medical Sciences, Albanian University, Durrës Street, Tirana 1000, Albania.
Science. 2018 Sep 7;361(6406):993-996. doi: 10.1126/science.aau0227. Epub 2018 Jul 19.
Topological defects play a key role in a variety of physical systems, ranging from high-energy to solid-state physics. A skyrmion is a type of topological defect that has shown promise for applications in the fields of magnetic storage and spintronics. We show that optical skyrmion lattices can be generated using evanescent electromagnetic fields and demonstrate this using surface plasmon polaritons, imaged by phase-resolved near-field optical microscopy. We show how the optical skyrmion lattice exhibits robustness to imperfections while the topological domain walls in the lattice can be continuously tuned, changing the spatial structure of the skyrmions from bubble type to Néel type. Extending the generation of skyrmions to photonic systems provides various possibilities for applications in optical information processing, transfer, and storage.
拓扑缺陷在从高能物理到固态物理等各种物理系统中起着关键作用。螺旋是一种拓扑缺陷，在磁存储和自旋电子学等领域的应用中具有广阔的前景。我们展示了可以使用消逝电磁场所产生的光学斯格明子晶格，并使用表面等离激元极化激元通过相分辨近场光学显微镜进行了成像。我们展示了光学斯格明子晶格如何对缺陷具有鲁棒性，同时晶格中的拓扑畴壁可以连续调节，从而将斯格明子的空间结构从泡型改变为奈尔型。将斯格明子的产生扩展到光子系统为光学信息处理、传输和存储的应用提供了各种可能性。
