Effect of random anisotropy in stabilization of skyrmions and antiskyrmions

Abstract Ever increasing demand of skyrmion manipulation in nanodevices has brought up interesting research to understand the stabilization of these topologically protected chiral structures. To understand the actual shape and size of skyrmions and antiskyrmions observed experimentally, we have performed micromagnetic simulations to investigate their stabilization in presence of random anisotropy in magnetic thin film system. Previous experimental reports of skyrmion imaging in thin films depicts that the skyrmion shape is not perfectly circular. Here we show via simulations that the shape of a skyrmion and an antiskyrmion can get distorted due to the presence of different local anisotropy energy. The values of uniaxial anisotropy constant ( K u ) and random aniostropy constant ( K r ) are varied to understand the change in shape and size of a skyrmion and an antiskyrmion stabilized in a square magnetic nanoelement. The skyrmion or antiskyrmion shape gets distorted with the presence of random anisotropy energy in the system.