Current lectures

No current lectures.

Past lectures

No past lectures.

The following publications are listed in the online university bibliography of the University of Duisburg-Essen. Further information may also be found on the person's personal web pages.

Topologically nontrivial textures hold great promise as information units for future data manipulation and storage devices, as well as for unconventional computing paradigms such as reservoir computing.

In two dimensions, a key example of such a texture is the magnetic skyrmion. During my PhD, I investigated the creation and dynamics of skyrmions driven by electrical currents in the cycloidal state of a magnet. In this state, skyrmions typically appear as H-shaped (see figure) and their motion is confined to 1D [Knapman, et al., J. Phys. D: Appl. Phys. 54, 404003 (2021)].

​
A schematic of a H-shaped skyrmion in a cycloidal background.
​​

A three-dimensional topologically non-trivial magnetic texture of significant interest is the magnetic hopfion (see figure). We provide and compare different numerical tools for calculating the corresponding topological index – the Hopf [Knapman, R. et al., arXiv:2410.22058]. Furthermore, we predicted and explored magnetic hopfions in (2+1)D spacetime.  [Knapman, R. et al., Commun. Phys. 7, 151 (2024)]

​
Magnetic hopfion texture created from a tube of skyrmions, showing various preimages of the equatorial points on the unit sphere of magnetisation.
​​