A comb rubbed through your hair picks up scraps of paper. Physicists decided to apply this simple trick at the microscopic level — to control magnetic vortices called skyrmions. A skyrmion is like a tiny tornado in a sea of magnetization: at its center, compass arrows point up, while at the edges they twist downward. This forms a stable knot that doesn't unravel on its own.
You can move, create, and erase such a knot with a charged tip — a needle rubbed with wool. The electric field from the tip slightly alters the magnetic properties of the material right beneath it, and the vortex obediently slides along with the needle. The authors calculated the voltages and distances at which the skyrmion stays intact and when it breaks apart. It turns out that a single tip can sculpt not only individual vortices but also entire ring-like structures — skyrmioniums.
The researchers mapped out the regimes of motion: slow sliding, fast running, and a region where the vortex can't take it and vanishes. This resembles a drain vortex: the water swirls as long as the flow isn't too strong, but with a heavy flow the vortex breaks. Controlling with an electric field instead of a current promises nearly zero heat generation — an important step toward compact magnetic memory where bits switch without heating up.
The same principle applies to quantum computing: skyrmions are considered as noise-protected carriers of information. The charged needle becomes a universal tool: it writes, erases, and moves magnetic patterns on a chip.
Skyrmions are named after British physicist Tony Skyrme, who in the 1960s came up with them as a mathematical model for describing nuclear particles, not magnetism.