Solitons are very promising for the design of the next generation of ultralow power devices for storage and computation. The key ingredient to achieve this goal is the fundamental understanding of their stabilization and manipulation. Here, we show how the interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya Interaction (i-DMI) is able to lift the energy degeneracy of a magnetic vortex state by stabilizing a topological soliton with radial chirality, hereafter called radial vortex. It has a non-integer skyrmion number S (0.5<|S|<1) due to both the vortex core polarity and the magnetization tilting induced by the i-DMI boundary conditions. Micromagnetic simulations predict that a magnetoresistive memory based on the radial vortex state in both free and polarizer layers can be efficiently switched by a threshold current density smaller than 10 6 A/cm 2 . The switching processes occur via the nucleation of topologically connected vortices and vortexantivortex pairs, followed by spin-wave emissions due to vortex-antivortex annihilations. 2Magnetic solitons, such as domain walls (DWs) [1,2,3,4], vortices [5,6,7,8,9,10,11] and skyrmions [12,13,14,15,16,17] From a fundamental point of view, the stabilization of a radial vortex gives rise to the possibility to create current densities with radial polarization for particle-trapping applications, such as skyrmion [22], analogously to what radially polarized beams can do in many optical systems [23].In order to show the main features and the possible applications of the radial vortex, extensive micromagnetic simulations have been performed. The first part of this letter focuses on the fundamental properties of the radial vortex, in terms of stability as a function of the i-DMI, 3 topology, nucleation as well as response to an in-plane field. The second part is dedicated to the analysis of the switching process of the radial vortex, underlining the differences with the circular vortex.We consider a CoFeB disk having a diameter d=250nm and a thickness t=1.0nm to have an in-plane easy axis at zero external field. To add the i-DMI, we consider the CoFeB coupled with a Pt (heavy metal) layer as already experimentally observed [24]. The study is carried out by means of a state-of-the-art micromagnetic solver which numerically integrates the Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert (LLG) equation [25,26,27], that includes the i-DMI contribution Fig.4(a)). An H ext =5.0mT yields a uniform magnetic state. Fig.4(b) shows the results for the circular vortex (|D|=0.0mJ/m 2 ). The displacement occurs along the direction perpendicular to the external field (insets Fig.4(b)) [7,32,33,34,35]. Together with the qualitatively different vortex core shift, the field value that leads to the radial vortex core expulsion is twice the one of the circular vortex. This is ascribed to the i-DMI and, in particular, to its boundary conditions, in fact, the expulsion field increases as a function of |D|. The key reason for that is the need of a larger field to align the out-of-plane tilted spins at the sample edges 5 perpendicu...

Spin-Hall oscillators (SHO) are promising sources of spin-wave signals for magnonics applications, and can serve as building blocks for magnonic logic in ultralow power computation devices. Thin magnetic layers used as “free” layers in SHO are in contact with heavy metals having large spin-orbital interaction, and, therefore, could be subject to the spin-Hall effect (SHE) and the interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (i-DMI), which may lead to the nonreciprocity of the excited spin waves and other unusual effects. Here, we analytically and micromagnetically study magnetization dynamics excited in an SHO with oblique magnetization when the SHE and i-DMI act simultaneously. Our key results are: (i) excitation of nonreciprocal spin-waves propagating perpendicularly to the in-plane projection of the static magnetization; (ii) skyrmions generation by pure spin-current; (iii) excitation of a new spin-wave mode with a spiral spatial profile originating from a gyrotropic rotation of a dynamical skyrmion. These results demonstrate that SHOs can be used as generators of magnetic skyrmions and different types of propagating spin-waves for magnetic data storage and signal processing applications.

A strategy to drive skyrmion motion by a combination of an anisotropy gradient and spin-Hall effect has recently been demonstrated. Here, we study the fundamental properties of this type of motion by combining micromagnetic simulations and a generalized Thiele's equation. We find that the anisotropy gradient drives the skyrmion mainly along the direction perpendicular to the gradient, due to the conservative part of the torque. There is some slower motion along the direction parallel to the anisotropy gradient due to damping torque. When an appropriate spin-Hall torque is added, the skyrmion velocity in the direction of the anisotropy gradient can be enhanced. This motion gives rise to acceleration of the skyrmion as this moves to regions of varying anisotropy. This phenomenon should be taken into account in experiments for the correct evaluation of the skyrmion velocity. We employ a Thiele-like formalism and derive expressions for the velocity and the acceleration of the skyrmion that match very well with micromagnetic simulation results.

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This paper introduces the concept of spin-orbit-torque-MRAM (SOT-MRAM) based physical unclonable function (PUF). The secret of the PUF is stored into a random state of a matrix of perpendicular SOT-MRAMs. Here, we show experimentally and with micromagnetic simulations that this random state is driven by the intrinsic nonlinear dynamics of the free layer of the memory excited by the SOT. In detail, a large enough current drives the magnetization along an in-plane direction. Once the current is removed, the in-plane magnetic state becomes unstable evolving towards one of the two perpendicular stable configurations randomly. In addition, an hybrid CMOS/spintronics model is used to evaluate the electrical characteristics of a PUF realized with an array of 16×16 SOT-MRAM cells. Beyond robustness against voltage and temperature variations, hardware authentication based on this PUF scheme has additional advantages over other PUF technologies such as non-volatility (no power consumption in standby mode), reconfigurability (the 2 secret can be rewritten), and scalability. We believe that this work is a step forward the design of spintronic devices for application in security.

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COVID-19 is a new pulmonary disease which is driving stress to the hospitals due to the large number of cases worldwide. Imaging of lungs can play a key role in the monitoring of health status. Non-contrast chest computed tomography (CT) has been used for this purpose, mainly in China, with significant success. However, this approach cannot be massively used, mainly for both high risk and cost, also in some countries, this tool is not extensively available. Alternatively, chest X-ray, although less sensitive than CT-scan, can provide important information about the evolution of pulmonary involvement during the disease; this aspect is very important to verify the response of a patient to treatments. Here, we show how to improve the sensitivity of chest X-ray via a nonlinear post-processing tool, named PACE (Pipeline for Advanced Contrast Enhancement), combining properly Fast and Adaptive Bidimensional Empirical Mode Decomposition (FABEMD) and Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE). The results show an enhancement of the image contrast as confirmed by three widely used metrics: (i) contrast improvement index, (ii) entropy, and (iii) measure of enhancement. This improvement gives rise to a detectability of more lung lesions as identified by two radiologists, who evaluated the images separately, and confirmed by CT-scans. The results show this method is a flexible and an effective approach for medical image enhancement and can be used as a post-processing tool for medical image understanding and analysis.

This paper describes a numerical experiment, based on full micromagnetic simulations of current-driven magnetization dynamics in nanoscale spin valves, to identify the origins of spectral linewidth broadening in spin torque oscillators. Our numerical results show two qualitatively different regimes of magnetization dynamics at zero temperature: regular (single-mode precessional dynamics) and chaotic. In the regular regime, the dependence of the oscillator integrated power on frequency is linear, and consequently the dynamics is well described by the analytical theory of current-driven magnetization dynamics for moderate amplitudes of oscillations. We observe that for higher oscillator amplitudes, the functional dependence of the oscillator integrated power as a function of frequency is not a single-valued function and can be described numerically via introduction of nonlinear oscillator power. For a range of currents in the regular regime, the oscillator spectral linewidth is a linear function of temperature. In the chaotic regime found at large current values, the linewidth is not described by the analytical theory. In this regime we observe the oscillator linewidth broadening, which originates from sudden jumps of frequency of the oscillator arising from random domain wall nucleation and propagation through the sample. This intermittent behavior is revealed through a wavelet analysis that gives superior description of the frequency jumps compared to several other techniques.