UG Student Zehan Chen Received The Championship Of The 2022 Mr. Armin And Mrs. Lillian Kitchell Undergraduate Research Award

Year 4 BSc (PHYS) student Zehan CHEN received the Championship of the 2022 Mr. Armin and Mrs. Lillian Kitchell Undergraduate Research Award. His award-winning project “Rational design of magnetic devices using micromagnetic simulations” was supervised by ECE Faculty Prof. Qiming SHAO.

Storage memories nowadays face problems like access speed, capacity, and volatility. Skyrmions, as topologically protected spin textures in ferromagnetic systems, are ideal candidates for the next generation memory due to their high controllability, small size, and stability. They can encode binary information by aligning on a track with a proper distance between each other. Reading the data requires the current-driven motion of skyrmions, where the nonlinearity beyond the traditional theory is involved. Zehan with the UROP team fully addressed this issue by proposing a new model describing the deformation of the current-driven skyrmion and further explaining the nonlinear dynamics of skyrmions. This model also predicts a critical current above which skyrmions eventually break down. Their theoretical predictions are well consistent with micromagnetic simulations. This model can be used to set proper current to drive skyrmions stably and fast in skyrmion-based memory.

Their works have been published in Physical Review Applied and Physical Review B.

Zehan Chen, Xichao Zhang, Yan Zhou, and Qiming Shao, “Skyrmion dynamics in the presence of deformation”, Phys. Rev. Appl. 17, L011002 (2022).

Laichuan Shen, Jing Xia, Zehan Chen, Xiaoguang Li, Xichao Zhang, Oleg A. Tretiakov, Qiming Shao, Guoping Zhao, Xiaoxi Liu, Motohiko Ezawa, and Yan Zhou, “Nonreciprocal dynamics of ferrimagnetic bimerons”, Phys. Rev. B 105, 014422 (2022)

The Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) is an HKUST signature program designed to provide undergraduate students with an exciting opportunity to engage in academic research, thereby helping them to develop insightful perspectives on their areas of interest and advance the frontiers of knowledge. All students who have successfully completed any one of the UROP courses (UROP 1000 / 1100 / 2100 / 3100 / 4100) are eligible to be nominated for the Mr. Armin and Mrs. Lillian Kitchell Undergraduate Research Award.

Figure 1. Rational design of magnetic devices using micromagnetic simulations

Figure 2. Photo of Zehan CHEN (right) and Prof. Qiming SHAO (left).