Ultrafast generation of skyrmionic defects with vortex beams: Printing laser profiles on magnets

Laser beams carrying orbital angular momentum (OAM), first proposed by Allen et al. in 1992, is one of hottest research subjects in modern optics. Such a beam, called an optical vortex, is used to realize superresolution microscopes, chiral optical ablation, optical tweezers, and so on. More recently, electron beams with nonzero OAM are also proposed and experimentally realized. In spite of the growing attention towards such ``vortex beams'', their applications for condensed matter physics are almost untapped so far, especially for controlling microscopic electronic and magnetic degrees of freedom in solids. Here, the authors show theoretically that vortex beams can be useful for controlling magnetic properties of solids. In particular, they focus on chiral ferromagnets and antiferromagnets where topologically stable magnetic defects (skyrmions) appear. On the basis of numerical simulations using the stochastic Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert equation, they show that via the laser-beam-induced spatially nonuniform temperature changes, the characteristic donut-shaped spatial profile of vortex beams can be faithfully transferred to magnets as a family of magnetic defects (nπ vortices), which include skyrmions and skyrmioniums.