Skyrmions are topologically stable particle like objects initially proposed by Tony Skyrme in 1961 to explain aspects of particle physics such as Baryons and Mesons. Skyrmions have now been discovered in a growing number of systems including chiral magnets, liquid crystals, nonlinear optics, and Bose-Einstein condensates.  They are an outstanding example of an emergent phenomenon where the underlying microscopic degrees of freedom such as individual spins in the case of a chiral magnets can have relatively small changes from one spin to another; however, the ensemble of spins acting together form a larger scale object that behaves like an emergent particle or soliton.  Skyrmions in chiral magnets were discovered in 2009 and now have been found in a wealth of different kinds of materials including some in which skyrmions are stable at room temperature. These systems have attracted intense interest not only for their unique static and dynamic phases but also for their potential use in applications as information carriers in magnetic memory or logic devices. Here we outline various aspects of skyrmions, particularly those in magnetic systems, the different types of phases they can exhibit, such as skyrmion crystals, glasses, or liquids, and the skyrmion dynamics, as well as the recent observation of related topological textures such as merons, polar skyrmions, antiskymions, and bound or quarklike confined skyrmions . 

Charles Reichhardt has a research position at the Theoretical Division of Los Alamos National Laboratory at Los Alamos, USA. He works in Condensed Matter Theory, Computational Statistical Mechanics and Complex Systems, particularly Vortex Matter in Superconductors, Skyrmions, Soft Matter, Nonequilibrium Statistical Mechanics, Materials Response, Active Matter and Complex Plasmas. He get his Ph.D degree in Physics from the University of Michigan in 1998, then did a postdoc at the University of California Davis and between 2000-2003 was a Richard P Feynman Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory. In 2011 was elected fellow of the American Physical Society.