Researchers at Florida State University have created a novel crystalline material that exhibits complex swirling magnetic behaviors not found in its parent compounds. By blending two structurally mismatched but chemically similar materials, the team induced atomic spins to form skyrmion-like textures. This breakthrough, detailed in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, could advance data storage and quantum technologies.
Scientists at Florida State University developed a new crystalline material by combining two compounds: one made of manganese, cobalt, and germanium, and another of manganese, cobalt, and arsenic. These elements are adjacent on the periodic table, making the compounds chemically alike yet structurally distinct due to differing crystal symmetries. This mismatch leads to structural frustration, where atomic arrangements compete, preventing a simple stable pattern.
The resulting hybrid crystal shows atomic spins organizing into intricate, repeating swirl patterns known as skyrmion-like spin textures, rather than the usual linear alignments seen in conventional magnets. "We thought that maybe this structural frustration would translate into magnetic frustration," explained co-author Michael Shatruk, a professor in the FSU Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. "If the structures are in competition, maybe that will cause the spins to twist."
To confirm the magnetic structure, the researchers employed single-crystal neutron diffraction on the TOPAZ instrument at Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Spallation Neutron Source. This technique revealed the cycloidal spin arrangements. The findings appeared in the Journal of the American Chemical Society in 2025 (volume 147, issue 47, page 43550).
These skyrmion-like textures offer advantages for technology, including denser data storage in hard drives, lower energy use in electronics, and more reliable quantum computing systems that resist errors. "With single-crystal neutron diffraction data from TOPAZ and new data-reduction and machine-learning tools from our LDRD project, we can now solve very complex magnetic structures with much greater confidence," noted Xiaoping Wang, a neutron scattering scientist at Oak Ridge.
Unlike past approaches that screened existing materials, this work designed the crystal intentionally using chemical principles to predict spin behaviors. "It's chemical thinking, because we're thinking about how the balance between these structures affects them and the relation between them, and then how it might translate to the relation between atomic spins," Shatruk said. Co-author Ian Campbell, a graduate student, added, "The idea is to be able to predict where these complex spin textures will appear."
The study involved collaborators from the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, University of Science and Technology Beijing, RWTH Aachen University, and Oak Ridge, supported by the National Science Foundation.