A fundamental property of particles and antiparticles, such as electrons and positrons, is their ability to annihilate one another. Similar behavior is predicted for magnetic solitons -- localized spin textures that can be distinguished by their topological index Q. Theoretically, magnetic topological solitons with opposite values of Q, such as skyrmions and their antiparticles -- antiskyrmions -- are expected to be able to merge continuously and to annihilate. However, experimental verification of such particle-antiparticle pair production and annihilation processes has been lacking. Here, we report the creation and annihilation of skyrmion-antiskyrmion pairs in an exceptionally thin film of the cubic chiral magnet B20-type FeGe observed using transmission electron microscopy. Our observations are highly reproducible and are fully consistent with micromagnetic simulations. Our findings provide a new platform for fundamental studies of particles and antiparticles based on magnetic solids and open new perspectives for practical applications of thin films of isotropic chiral magnets.
@article{arxiv.2112.04942,
title = {Magnetic particle-antiparticle creation and annihilation},
author = {Fengshan Zheng and Nikolai S. Kiselev and Luyan Yang and Vladyslav M. Kuchkin and Filipp N. Rybakov and Stefan Blügel and Rafal E. Dunin-Borkowski},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2112.04942},
year = {2022}
}