Chiral magnetic skyrmions^1,2 are nanoscale vortex-like spin textures that form in the presence of an applied magnetic field in ferromagnets that support the Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interaction (DMI) because of strong spin–orbit coupling and broken inversion symmetry of the crystal^3,4. In sharp contrast to other systems^5,6 that allow for the formation of a variety of two-dimensional (2D) skyrmions, in chiral magnets the presence of the DMI commonly prevents the stability and coexistence of topological excitations of different types⁷. Recently, a new type of localized particle-like object—the chiral bobber (ChB)—was predicted theoretically in such materials⁸. However, its existence has not yet been verified experimentally. Here, we report the direct observation of ChBs in thin films of B20-type FeGe by means of quantitative off-axis electron holography (EH). We identify the part of the temperature–magnetic field phase diagram in which ChBs exist and distinguish two mechanisms for their nucleation. Furthermore, we show that ChBs are able to coexist with skyrmions over a wide range of parameters, which suggests their possible practical applications in novel magnetic solid-state memory devices, in which a stream of binary data bits can be encoded by a sequence of skyrmions and bobbers.

手性磁性Skyrmions ^1,2是纳米级涡旋状自旋织构，形成于铁磁体中，由于强自旋-轨道耦合和破碎的晶体反转对称性，在支持Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya相互作用（DMI）的铁磁体中形成了^{3 ，4}。与允许形成各种二维（2D）天体离子的其他系统^5,6形成鲜明对比的是，在手性磁体中，DMI的存在通常会阻止不同类型的拓扑激发⁷的稳定性和共存性。最近，一种新类型的局部颗粒状物体的手性的浮子（CHB）-was在这样的材料理论上预测⁸。但是，它的存在尚未经过实验验证。在这里，我们报告通过定量离轴电子全息图（EH）的方法直接观察B20型FeGe薄膜中的ChBs。我们确定了存在ChBs的温度-磁场相图部分，并区分了其成核的两种机理。此外，我们表明ChB可以在很大范围的参数上与Skyrmion共存，这表明它们在新颖的磁性固态存储设备中可能的实际应用，其中二进制数据比特流可以由一系列Skyrmion编码和浮子。