Fig. 4
From: Schools of skyrmions with electrically tunable elastic interactions
Coherent skyrmion motion in a school. a Experimental polarizing micrograph of moving skyrmions in a school without clustering for initial packing fraction of 0.09 by area at U = 3.75 V and f = 50 Hz. Polarizer and analyzer orientations are marked with double arrows and directions of E and skyrmion motion are marked in the bottom-right corner. b Trajectories of skyrmion motions color-coded with time according to the scheme shown in the right-side inset (where tmin = 0 and tmax = 72 s); these trajectories correspond to Supplementary Movie 5. The scale bars in a, b are 100 µm. c Interaction potential (extracted from the radial distribution function g(rcc) shown in the inset) of center-to-center distances rcc for schooling skyrmions at conditions like in a. d Evolution of S and Q with time. Insets schematically show corresponding configurations colored according to the scheme in the inset of Fig. 1g. e Giant-number fluctuation analysis using a log–log plot of ΔN versus <N>; black dashed line indicates a slope of 0.5 for reference. f An example of number density fluctuation during motion for a 400 µm × 400 µm sample area. Such schools of individually dispersed, collectively moving skyrmions are observed at U = 2.5–4.25 V and initial packing fractions within 0.01–0.09 by area. The LC is ZLI-2806 doped with right-handed additive CB-15 (see Methods)
