Voltage-Driven High-Speed Skyrmion Motion in a Skyrmion-Shift Device

Magnetic skyrmions are promising information carriers for building future high-density and high-speed spintronic devices. However, to achieve a current-driven high-speed skyrmion motion, the required driving-current density is usually very large, which could be energy inefficient and even destroy the device due to Joule heating. The mechanism of voltage-driven skyrmion motion through equidistant identical electrodes on a uniformly thick nanowire is studied. The high-speed skyrmion motion is realized by utilizing a voltage shift, and the average skyrmion velocity reaches up to 259 m/s under a 0.45-V applied voltage. In comparison with the widely studied vertical current-driven model, the energy dissipation is three orders of magnitude lower in our voltage-driven model for the same speed motion of skyrmions. Our approach uncovers valuable opportunities for building skyrmion racetrack memories and logic devices with both ultra-low power consumption and ultra-high processing speed, which are appealing features for future spintronic applications.