Confinement-controlled pathways to complex skyrmionic textures in Co/W/Pt multilayers

Abstract

Magnetic skyrmions and higher-order topological spin textures offer rich opportunities for multi-level information encoding, yet their deterministic stabilization and transformation under geometric confinement at room temperature remain poorly understood. Here, we demonstrate that geometric confinement acts as a robust and universal control parameter that governs a hierarchical transformation pathway of chiral spin textures in Pt/Co/W multilayer micro-tracks. As the confinement increases, extended labyrinth domains fragment into isolated skyrmions, followed by the systematic suppression of skyrmion pairs and the preferential stabilization of compact higher-order textures. We find that confinement strongly enhances the formation of skyrmioniums via recombination and promotes their subsequent evolution into uniform skyrmion bags by capturing additional skyrmions. Statistical analysis reveals a confinement-driven redistribution of topological populations, with skyrmion bags emerging as the dominant state in the narrowest tracks. Supported by micromagnetic simulations, our results establish geometric confinement as a deterministic selector of complex topological textures and reveal a previously unexplored route for engineering higher-order skyrmionic states at room temperature. These findings provide a scalable materials strategy for multistate skyrmion-based spintronic and memory architectures.