Figure 1
(Color) MFM images showing the annihilation and creation of kinked stacks of pancake vortices, which appear as pairs of sub-
, isolated features. (a) Cartoon of a side view of a kinked pancake stack (ellipses), including the core of the vortex (vertical lines) and the interlayer Josephson vortex (thick blue line).
-depth of the kinked structure,
-lateral separation between the stacks. Also depicted are the
layers (horizontal lines). (b) Initial configuration of vortices after field cooling from
to
. Scan height
. Most of the features in this scan are
vortices. There are also what appear to be sub-
features, referred as partial vortex stacks. The solid frame shows the scan area for Figs. 1c, 1d, 1e and highlights a pair of partial stacks. The dashed frame shows the scan area for Fig. 2. Also plotted are the scanning
,
axes. [(c)–(e)] Scans at
of the two stacks in the solid frame in (b). The arrows show the tip path used for manipulation, as described in the text. (c) Scan before annihilation
, (d) scan after annihilation and before creation
, and (e) scan after creation
. In (e) the tip starts scanning from the bottom left corner and is incremented along
after each raster period. The vortex stack on the left jumps as the tip scans over it. The dots and arrows show positions where the stack is trapped temporarily and the trajectory of its motion. Here,
is much smaller than the force required to move a regular vortex, indicating an unstable stack configuration.
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