title: Selective Chemical Vapor Deposition Growth of Cubic FeGe Nanowires That Support Stabilized Magnetic Skyrmions.
abstract: Magnetic skyrmions are topologically stable vortex-like spin structures that are promising for next generation information storage applications. Materials that host magnetic skyrmions, such as MnSi and FeGe with the noncentrosymmetric cubic B20 crystal structure, have been shown to stabilize skyrmions upon nanostructuring. Here, we report a chemical vapor deposition method to selectively grow nanowires (NWs) of cubic FeGe out of three possible FeGe polymorphs for the first time using finely ground particles of cubic FeGe as seeds. X-ray diffraction and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) confirm that these micron-length NWs with ∼100 nm to 1 μm diameters have the cubic B20 crystal structure. Although Fe13Ge8NWs are also formed, the two types of NWs can be readily differentiated by their faceting. Lorentz TEM imaging of the cubic FeGe NWs reveals a skyrmion lattice phase under small applied magnetic fields (∼0.1 T) at 233 K, a skyrmion chain state at lower temperatures (95 K) and under high magnetic fields (∼0.4 T), and a larger skyrmion stability window than bulk FeGe. This synthetic approach to cubic FeGe NWs that support stabilized skyrmions opens a route toward the exploration of new skyrmion physics and devices based on similar nanostructures.
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, University of Wisconsin-Madison , 1101 University Avenue, Madison, Wisconsin 53706, United States.
authors.forename: Matthew J
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-6704-0862
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: Stolt
authors.affiliation: Beijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics, Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences , Beijing 100190, China.|Ernst Ruska-Centre for Microscopy and Spectroscopy with Electrons and Peter Grünberg Institute, Research Centre Jülich , 52425 Jülich, Germany.
authors.forename: Zi-An
authors.initials: ZA
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, University of Wisconsin-Madison , 1101 University Avenue, Madison, Wisconsin 53706, United States.
authors.forename: Brandon
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Phillips
authors.affiliation: School of Materials Science and Engineering, Tsinghua University , 100084 Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Dongsheng
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Song
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, University of Wisconsin-Madison , 1101 University Avenue, Madison, Wisconsin 53706, United States.
authors.forename: Nitish
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Mathur
authors.affiliation: Ernst Ruska-Centre for Microscopy and Spectroscopy with Electrons and Peter Grünberg Institute, Research Centre Jülich , 52425 Jülich, Germany.
authors.forename: Rafal E
authors.initials: RE
authors.lastname: Dunin-Borkowski
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, University of Wisconsin-Madison , 1101 University Avenue, Madison, Wisconsin 53706, United States.
authors.forename: Song
authors.identifier: 0000-0001-8693-7010
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Jin
keywords: Cubic FeGe; Lorentz TEM; chemical vapor deposition; magnetic skyrmion; nanowires