We perform ultrafast pump-probe measurements on a nanometer-thick crystalline Bi-doped yttrium iron garnet film with perpendicular magnetic anisotropy. Tuning the photon energy of the pump laser pulses above and below the material's bandgap, we trigger ultrafast optical and spin dynamics via both one- and two-photon absorption. Contrary to the common scenario, the optically-induced heating of the system induces an increase up to 20% of the ferromagnetic resonance frequency. We explain this unexpected result in terms of a photo-induced modification of the magnetic anisotropy, i.e. of the effective field, identifying the necessary conditions to observe this effect. Our results disclose the possibility to optically increase the magnetic eigenfrequency in nanometer-thick magnets.
Conductivities are key material parameters that govern various types of transport (electronic charge, spin, heat etc.) driven by thermodynamic forces. Magnons, the elementary excitations of the magnetic order, flow under the gradient of a magnon chemical potential in proportion to a magnon (spin) conductivity $σ_{m}$. The magnetic insulator yttrium iron garnet (YIG) is the material of choice for efficient magnon spin transport. Here we report an unexpected giant $σ_{m}$ in record-thin YIG films with thicknesses down to 3.7 nm when the number of occupied two-dimensional (2D) subbands is reduced…
Spin waves can probe the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI) which gives rise to topological spin textures, such as skyrmions. However, the DMI has not yet been reported in yttrium iron garnet (YIG) with arguably the lowest damping for spin waves. In this work, we experimentally evidence the interfacial DMI in a 7~nm-thick YIG film by measuring the nonreciprocal spin wave propagation in terms of frequency, amplitude and most importantly group velocities using all electrical spin-wave spectroscopy. The velocities of propagating spin waves show chirality among three vectors, i.e. the film no…
We study experimentally the propagation of nanosecond spin-wave pulses in microscopic waveguides made of nanometer-thick yttrium iron garnet films. For these studies, we use micro-focus Brillouin light scattering spectroscopy, which provides the possibility to observe propagation of the pulses with high spatial and temporal resolution. We show that, for most spin-wave frequencies, dispersion leads to broadening of the pulse by several times at propagation distances of 10 micrometers. However, for certain frequency interval, the dispersion broadening is suppressed almost completely resulting in…
Ultrathin bismuth-yttrium iron garnet films with tunable magnetic anisotropy
ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Université Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Institut Néel（格勒诺布尔阿尔卑斯大学，法国国家科学研究中心，内耳研究所）；Kyoto University（京都大学）；University of Konstanz（康斯坦茨大学）；Instituto de Nanociencia y Materiales de Aragón, CSIC（阿拉贡纳米科学与材料研究所，西班牙国家研究委员会）；Universidad de Zaragoza（萨拉戈萨大学）
Magnon transport through a magnetic insulator can be controlled by current-biased heavy-metal gates that modulate the magnon conductivity via the magnon density. Here, we report nonlinear modulation effects in 10$\,$nm thick yttrium iron garnet (YIG) films. The modulation efficiency is larger than 40\%/mA. The spin transport signal at high DC current density (2.2$\times 10^{11}\,$A/m$^{2}$) saturates for a 400$\,$nm wide Pt gate, which indicates that even at high current levels a magnetic instability cannot be reached in spite of the high magnetic quality of the films.
The research into insulating ferrimagnetic garnets has gained enormous momentum in the past decade. This is partly due to the improvement in the techniques to grow high-quality ultrathin films with desirable properties and the advances in understanding the spin transport within the ferrimagnetic garnets and through their interfaces with conducting materials. In recent years, we have seen remarkable progress in controlling the magnetization state of ferrimagnetic garnets by electrical means in suitable heterostructures and device architectures. These advances have readily placed ferrimagnetic g…
Yttrium iron garnet (YIG) is a magnetic insulator with record-low damping, allowing spin-wave transport over macroscopic distances. Doping YIG with gallium ions greatly reduces the demagnetizing field and introduces a perpendicular magnetic anisotropy, which leads to an isotropic spin-wave dispersion that facilitates spin-wave optics and spin-wave steering. Here, we characterize the dispersion of a gallium-doped YIG (Ga:YIG) thin film using electrical spectroscopy. We determine the magnetic anisotropy parameters from the ferromagnetic resonance frequency and use propagating spin wave spectrosc…
Perpendicular magnetic anisotropy in thin films enables extraordinary spin-wave phenomena: anti-Larmor precession, negative reflection and refraction, multi-reflection and multi-refraction
We study the damping of perpendicular standing spin-waves (PSSWs) in ultrathin Fe films at frequencies up to 2.4 THz. The PSSWs are excited by optically generated ultrashort spin current pulses, and probed optically in the time domain. Analyzing the wavenumber and thickness dependence of the damping, we demonstrate that at sufficiently large wave vectors $k$ the damping is dominated by spin transport effects scaling with k^4 and limiting the frequency range of observable PSSWs. Although this contribution is known to originate in the spin diffusion, we argue that at moderate and large k a more …
Ultrafast heat transport in nanoscale metal multilayers is of great interest in the context of optically-induced demagnetization, remagnetization and switching. We investigate the structural response and the energy flow in the ultrathin double-layer system Gold (Au) on ferromagnetic Nickel (Ni) by ultrafast x-ray diffraction (UXRD). The penetration depth of light exceeds the bilayer thickness, preventing unambiguous layer-specific information from optical probes. Even though the excitation pulse is incident from the Au side, we observe a very rapid heating of the Ni lattice, whereas the Au lat…
Metasurfaces are ultrathin nanostructured surfaces that can allow arbitrary manipulation of light. Implementing dynamic tunability into their design could allow the optical functions of metasurfaces to be rapidly modified at will. The most pronounced and robust tunability of optical properties is provided by phase-change materials such as vanadium dioxide (VO2) and germanium antimony telluride (GST), but their implementations have been limited only to near-infrared wavelengths. Here, we demonstrate that VO2 nanoantennas with widely tunable Mie resonances can be utilized for designing tunable m…
We report the manipulation of nitrogen vacancy (NV) spins in diamond when nearby ferrimagnetic insulator, yttrium iron garnet, is driven into precession. The change in NV spin polarization, as measured by changes in photoluminescence, is comparable in magnitude to that from conventional optically detected magnetic resonance, but relies on a distinct mechanism as it occurs at a microwave frequency far removed from the magnetic resonance frequency of the NV spin. This observation presents a new approach to transferring ferromagnetic spin information into a paramagnet and then transducing the res…
Floquet states have been subject of great research interest since Zel'dovich's pioneering work on the quasienergy of a quantum system subject to a temporally periodic action. Nowadays periodic modulation of the system Hamiltonian is mostly achieved by microwaves leading to novel exciting phenomena in condensed matter physics: Floquet topological insulators, chiral edge states etc. On the other hand, nonthermal optical control of magnetization at picosecond time scales is currently a highly appealing research topic for potential applications in magnetic data storage. Here we combine these two c…
In search of two level quantum systems that implement a qubit, the nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in diamond has been intensively studied for years. Despite favorable properties such as remarkable defect spin coherence times, the addressability of NV centers raises some technical issues. The coupling of a single NV center to an external driving field is limited to short distances, since an efficient coupling requires the NV to be separated by only a few microns away from the source. As a way to overcome this problem, an enhancement of coherent coupling between NV centers and a microwave field ha…
We examine the far-field optical response, under-plane wave excitation in the presence of a static magnetic field, of core-shell nanoparticles involving a gyroelectric component, either as the inner or the outer layer, through analytic calculations based on appropriately extended Mie theory. We focus on absorption and scattering of light by bismuth-substituted yttrium iron garnet (Bi:YIG) nanospheres and nanoshells, combined with excitonic materials such as organic-molecule aggregates or two-dimensional transition-metal dichalcogenides, and discuss the hybrid character of the modes emerging fr…
