Switching of Skyrmion chirality by local heating.

Magnetic Skyrmions are energetically stable entities formed in a ferromagnet with a diameter of typically below 100 nm and are easily displaceable using an electrical current of 10 A/cm, resulting the Skyrmions to be more advantageous than domain walls for spintronic memory applications. Here, we demonstrated switching of a chirality of magnetic Skyrmions formed in magnetic thin films by introducing a pulsed heat spot using micromagnetic simulation. Skyrmions are found to expand with a pulsed heat spot, which induces the magnetic moments surrounding the Skyrmion to rotate by this expansion, followed by the chirality switching of the Skyrmion. Such simple controllability can be used as a fundamental building block for memory and logic devices using the chirality of Skyrmions as a data bit.