Metastable solitonic states in the strained itinerant helimagnet FeGe

Tensile strain is a promising tool for the creation and manipulation of magnetic solitonic textures in chiral helimagnets via tunable control of magnetic anisotropy and Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction. Here, by using in situ resonant small-angle x-ray scattering, we demonstrate that skyrmion and chiral soliton lattices can be achieved as metastable states in FeGe lamella as distinct states under tensile strain and magnetic fields in various orientations with respect to the deformation. The small-angle scattering data can be well accounted for in the framework of the analytical model for a soliton lattice. By using the experimental results and analytical theory, the unwinding of metastable skyrmions in a perpendicular magnetic field as shown by a small-angle scattering experiment was analyzed via micromagnetic simulation.