Greater insight into the pinning effects of skyrmions

When researchers use an optical Kerr microscope to zoom in on thin films of magnetic material, given the right conditions, they observe a sort of micro-scale magnetic hurricane. Physicists call these whirlwind-like magnetic structures skyrmions. The idea is to use this phenomenon for data storage or processing devices. For those applications, the motion of the mini-whirlwinds, which themselves act as stand-alone particles or so-called quasi-particles, has to be exploited.