Annealing process of Co-Fe-B based multilayers showing skyrmion Brownian motion

Skyrmions are topological spin textures that exhibit Brownian motion in solids. They have attracted increasing research interest in terms of realizing a device that utilizing stochastic behavior and investigating new physical phenomena. However, skyrmions that exhibit Brownian motion are sensitive to changes in magnetic properties and are easily affected by aging variation. For instance, although skyrmions appear in a sample immediately after fabrication, they sometimes disappear after few weeks. This characteristic prevents the reproducibility experiment and affects device stability. In this study, we demonstrated that aging variation can be suppressed by annealing in air for only 3 min, which is an easy and rapid method. We investigated the change in the magnetic properties by annealing and air exposure and found that the main mechanism of aging variation is oxidation of the sample surface. The magnetic properties of samples with Pt and thick SiO2 capping were analyzed, and we demonstrated that aging variation can be suppressed by avoiding surface oxidation. Our work accelerates the research of fundamental physics regarding skyrmion Brownian motion and of device applications utilizing stochastic system.