Magnetic vortices observed in haematite
Vortices are common in nature, but their formation can be hampered by long range forces. In work recently published in Nature Materials, an international team of researchers has used mapped X-ray magnetic linear and circular dichroism photoemission electron microscopy to observe magnetic vortices in thin films of antiferromagnetic haematite, and their transfer to an overlaying ferromagnetic sample. Their results suggest that the ferromagnetic vortices may be merons, and indicate that vortex/meron pairs can be manipulated by the application of an in-plane magnetic field, giving rise to large-scale vortex–antivortex annihilation. Ferromagnetic merons can be thought of as topologically protected spin 'bits,' and could potentially be used for information storage in meron racetrack memory devices, similar to the skyrmion racetrack memory devices currently being considered.