The operational characteristics of a magnonic crystal, which was fabricated as an array of shallow grooves etched on a surface of a magnetic film, were compared for magnetostatic surface spin waves and backward volume magnetostatic spin waves. In both cases the formation of rejection frequency bands was studied as a function of the grooves depth. It has been found that the rejection of the volume wave is considerably larger than of the surface one. The influences of the nonreciprocity of the surface spin waves as well as of the scattering of the lowest volume spin-wave mode into higher thickness volume modes on the rejection efficiency are discussed.
We study the propagation of surface spin waves in two wave guides coupled through the dipole-dipole interaction. Essential for the observations made here is the magneto-electric coupling between the spin waves and the effective ferroelectric polarization. This allows an external electric field to act on spin waves and to modify the band gaps of magnonic excitations in individual layers. By an on/off switching of the electric field and/or varying its strength or direction with respect to the equilibrium magnetization, it is possible to permit or ban the propagation of the spin waves in selected waveguide. We propose experimentally feasible nanoscale device operating as a high fidelity surface wave magnonic gate.
We study theoretically the influence of the temperature and disorder on the spin wave spectrum of the magnonic crystal Fe$_{1-c}$Co$_{c}$. Our formalism is based on the analysis of a Heisenberg Hamiltonian by means of the wave vector and frequency dependent transverse magnetic susceptibility. The exchange integrals entering the model are obtained from the emph{ab initio} magnetic force theorem. The coherent potential approximation is employed to treat the disorder and random phase approximation in order to account for the softening of the magnon spectrum at finite temperatures. The alloy turns out to exhibit many advantageous properties for spintronic applications. Apart from high Curie temperature, its magnonic bandgap remains stable at elevated temperatures and is largely unaffected by the disorder. We pay particular attention to the attenuation of magnons introduced by the alloying. The damping turns out to be a non-monotonic function of the impurity concentration due to the non-trivial evolution of the value of exchange integrals with the Co concentration. The disorder induced damping of magnons is estimated to be much smaller than their Landau damping.
Transmission of microwave spin waves through a microstructured magnonic crystal in the form of a permalloy waveguide of a periodically varying width was studied experimentally and theoretically. The spin wave characteristics were measured by spatially-resolved Brillouin light scattering microscopy. A rejection frequency band was clearly observed. The band gap frequency was controlled by the applied magnetic field. The measured spin-wave intensity as a function of frequency and propagation distance is in good agreement with a model calculation.
The spin-selective electron reflection at a ferromagnetic-paramagnetic interface is investigated using Fe films on a W(110) substrate. Angle-resolved photoemission of the majority and minority Fermi surfaces of the Fe film is used to probe standing wave formation. Intense quantum well states resulting from interfacial reflection are observed exclusively for majority states. Such high spin polarization is explained by the Fermi surface topology of the connecting substrate, and we argue that Fe/W is a particularly suitable interface for that purpose.
The research field of magnonics proposes a low-energy wave-logic computation technology based on spin waves to complement the established CMOS technology and to provide a basis for emerging unconventional computation architectures, e.g. neuromorphic or quantum computing. However, magnetic damping is a limiting factor for all-magnonic logic circuits and multi-device networks, ultimately rendering mechanisms to efficiently manipulate and amplify spin waves a necessity. In this regard, parallel pumping is a versatile tool since it allows to selectively generate and amplify spin waves. While extensively studied in microscopic systems, nano-scaled systems are lacking investigation to assess the feasibility and potential future use of parallel pumping in magnonics. Here, we investigate a longitudinally magnetized 100 nm-wide magnonic nano-conduit using space and time-resolved micro-focused Brillouin-light-scattering spectroscopy. Employing parallel pumping to generate spin waves, we observe that a non-resonant excitation of dipolar spin-waves is favored over the resonant excitation of short wavelength exchange spin waves. In addition, we utilize this technique to access the effective spin-wave relaxation time of an individual nano-conduit, observing a large relaxation time up to (115.0 +- 7.6) ns. Despite the significant decrease of the ellipticity of the magnetization precession in the investigated nano-conduit, a reasonably small threshold is found rendering parallel parametric amplification feasible on the nano-scale.