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It is remarkable how big of a role magnets have in your daily life. Not only are there magnets on your refrigerator, but they are also used in the speaker of your cell phone and in the hard drive of your computer. In the competition between technology companies, faster and faster hard drives with more storage are being developed. However, current technologies are running into a limit. Therefore, new methods are needed to build hard drives with. One of the new techniques in which there is a lot of interest is very thin magnets that contain special magnetic structures.

If you stick a thin magnet on a layer of platinum, a spiral structure arises in the magnet: the magnetization of the atoms rotates ever so slightly clockwise compared to their neighboring atom. The special feature of these systems is that the direction of rotation is always the same.

Under the influence of an external magnetic field, these spirals are deformed into a special structure called a skyrmion. This skyrmion is a hot topic in the magnetic research field because it is a very solid structure: it takes a lot of energy to make a skyrmion disappear. Therefore, it is extremely suitable for applications such as computer memory because it does not break down quickly.

In my dissertation we investigated how such structures react when we stack several magnetic layers on top of each other. For example, we found that a lattice of skyrmions changed shape under the influence of the other layers.