PACS:Understanding the physical properties of magnetic skyrmions is important for fundamental research with the aim to develop new spintronic device paradigms where both logic and memory can be integrated at the same level. Here, we show a universal model based on the micromagnetic formalism that can be used to study skyrmion stability as a function of magnetic field and temperature. We consider ultrathin, circular ferromagnetic magnetic dots. Our results show that magnetic skyrmions with a small radius-compared to the dot radius-are always metastable, while large radius skyrmions form a stable ground state. The change of energy profile determines the weak (strong) size dependence of the metastable (stable) skyrmion as a function of temperature and/or field. These results can open a path toward the design of optimal materials for skyrmion based devices.2 Non-linear localized excitations have attracted the attention of physicists for a long time.Such excitations, including solitary waves or solitons, play an important role in optics, quantum field theory, condensed matter and other fields. It is sometimes possible to associate integer numbers (topological charges) to the solitons, which are preserved in their dynamics. Topologically non-trivial magnetization configurations in ferromagnets, such as domain walls, vortices, and skyrmions are currently the focus of a lot of research activity. These spin textures are also candidates for nanoscale device applications-computational paradigms, magnetic storage and programmable logic-due to their small size [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13].Skyrmion solutions were obtained first by Skyrme in the non-linear field theory [14].Subsequently chiral skyrmions were predicted [15], and discovered experimentally in noncentrosymmetric cubic B20 compounds [16][17][18][19][20] which permit an antisymmetric anisotropic interaction, namely the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI). This arises from a relativistic correction and relies on spin-orbit interactions [21,22]. Recent efforts have focused on materials with interfacial DMI-especially ultra-thin transition metal/heavy metal multilayers with large spinorbit coupling such as Co/Pt and Co/Ir [8,23,24]. The DMI, which corresponds to Lifshitz invariants in the micromagnetic energy functional, is necessary to yield axisymmetric skyrmions in ultrathin magnetic elements and the chiral skyrmions can be further stabilized by external magnetic field [8,23,24]. Temperature is usually considered to be detrimental to skyrmion stability, leading to either the transformation of the skyrmion state into a more energetically favorable state [25] or to nucleation of multiple skyrmions and labyrinth domains [8,23,24]. In addition, recent roomtemperature experiments with an external out-of-plane magnetic field [8,23], showed a strong nonlinear dependence of the skyrmion radius on the external field strength pointing out the key role of the external field. Here, we develop a theoretical approach to skyrmion stability based on minimization ...