Magnetic Skyrmions and Topological Domain Walls

Whether in the compass in the early ages of mankind or in the hard disk drives that provide the vast quantities of memory that nowadays information technology demands: magnetism is a ubiquitous phenomenon with numerous applications in our everyday life. The comparatively young skyrmion, in turn, adds with its topologically non-trivial structure a new flavor to this extensively studied field. This cumulative dissertation explores the diverse phenomena that occur in magnets, where non-collinear magnetization-textures are stabilized as a consequence of broken mirror or inversion symmetries of the material. These textures include long-ranged spirals, lattices of skyrmions, and polarized structures