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. 2018 Feb 21;8:3433. doi: 10.1038/s41598-018-21623-3

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© The Author(s) 2018

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Mechanisms of the skyrmion annihilation in a fcc-Pd/Fe/Ir(111) racetrack. Energy variation along the MEPs for radial collapse of the skyrmion in the interior of the strip (a) and escape of the skyrmion through the boundary (b), shown for four values of applied magnetic field. The filled circles show position of the intermediate states along the annihilation paths, while crosses indicate energy maxima along the MEPs. Variation of the absolute value of the topological charge along the MEPs is represented by a purple line for B = 3.5 T. The reaction coordinate is defined as the normalized displacement along the MEP. The starting- and end-points of the reaction coordinate are the skyrmion and ferromagnetic states, respectively. The encircled numbers label the states for which spin configurations are shown in the lower panel (c). The background color indicates the value of the out-of-plane component of the magnetic vectors (red ↔ up, blue ↔ down). Black solid lines show the contour where the out-of-plane component of magnetization vanishes.