Related Experiment Video
Updated: Feb 12, 2026

A Micropatterning Assay for Measuring Cell Chirality
Published on: March 11, 2022
Experimental observation of chiral magnetic bobbers in B20-type FeGe
Fengshan Zheng1, Filipp N Rybakov2,3,4, Aleksandr B Borisov3,4
1Ernst Ruska-Centre for Microscopy and Spectroscopy with Electrons and Peter Grünberg Institute, Forschungszentrum Jülich, Jülich, Germany.
Abstract:
Chiral magnetic skyrmions1,2 are nanoscale vortex-like spin textures that form in the presence of an applied magnetic field in ferromagnets that support the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI) because of strong spin-orbit coupling and broken inversion symmetry of the crystal3,4. In sharp contrast to other systems5,6 that allow for the formation of a variety of two-dimensional (2D) skyrmions, in chiral magnets the presence of the DMI commonly prevents the stability and coexistence of topological excitations of different types 7 . Recently, a new type of localized particle-like object-the chiral bobber (ChB)-was predicted theoretically in such materials 8 . However, its existence has not yet been verified experimentally. Here, we report the direct observation of ChBs in thin films of B20-type FeGe by means of quantitative off-axis electron holography (EH). We identify the part of the temperature-magnetic field phase diagram in which ChBs exist and distinguish two mechanisms for their nucleation. Furthermore, we show that ChBs are able to coexist with skyrmions over a wide range of parameters, which suggests their possible practical applications in novel magnetic solid-state memory devices, in which a stream of binary data bits can be encoded by a sequence of skyrmions and bobbers.
Related Concept Videos
Chirality
Chiral objects exhibit a sense of handedness when they interact with another chiral object. For example, our left foot can only fit in the left shoe and not in the right shoe. Achiral objects — objects that have...
Chirality in Nature
Naturalistic Observations
Chirality at Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Sulfur
A consequence of chirality is the need for enantiomeric resolution. While this is theoretically possible for all...
Molecules with Multiple Chiral Centers
Observational Learning

