Micro-focused Brillouin light scattering: imaging spin waves at the nanoscale

By T. Sebastian, K. Schultheiss, B. Obry, Burkard Hillebrands, H. Schultheiss. Frontiers of Physics, 2015

326 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Spin waves constitute an important part of research in the field of magnetization dynamics. Spin waves are the elementary excitations of the spin system in a magnetically ordered material state and magnons are their quasi particles. In the following article, we will discuss the optical method of Brillouin light scattering (BLS) spectroscopy which is a now a well established tool for the characterization of spin waves. BLS is the inelastic scattering of light from spin waves and confers several benefits: the ability to map the spin wave intensity distribution with spatial resolution and high sensitivity as well as the potential to simultaneously measure the frequency and the wave vector and, therefore, the dispersion properties. For several decades, the field of spin waves gained huge interest by the scientific community due to its relevance regarding fundamental issues of spindynamics in the field of solid states physics. The ongoing research in recent years has put emphasis on the high potential of spin waves regarding information technology. In the emerging field of \textit{magnonics}, several concepts for a spin-wave based logic have been proposed and realized. Opposed to charge-based schemes in conventional electronics and spintronics, magnons are charge-free currents of angular momentum, and, therefore, less subject to scattering processes that lead to heating and dissipation. This fact is highlighted by the possibility to utilize spin waves as information carriers in electrically insulating materials. These developments have propelled the quest for ways and mechanisms to guide and manipulate spin-wave transport. In particular, a lot of effort is put into the miniaturization of spin-wave waveguides and the excitation of spin waves in structures with sub-micrometer dimensions. For the further development of potential spin-wave-based devices, the ability to directly observe spin-wave propagation with spatial resolution is crucial. As an optical technique BLS do

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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Citations in the corpus

Electrical Detection of Magnetization Dynamics via Spin Rectification Effects (2016, methodology): “In BLS the Stokes and anti-Stokes shifts produced by the creation and absorption of magnons are measured using a sensitive tandem Fabry-Pérot interferometer, which can access both the spatial and temporal properties of spin wave packets, and simultaneously various frequencies in a wide frequency ran”
Cavity magnonics (2021, methodology): “…and Demidov, 2008), e.g. in identifying a magnon Bose-Einstein condensate (Demokritov et al., 2006), characterizing artificial magnonic crystals (Baba et al., 2019; Chumak et al., 2009; Sebastian et al., 2015), or probing magnetic textures (Novosad et al., 2002; Schultheiss et al., 2019).”
Towards Oxide Electronics: a Roadmap (2019, background): “The decay of finite wave number magnons can be studied by optical techniques which, however, are mostly restricted to small wave numbers [573,574].”
Magnetic texture based magnonics (2020, methodology): “Please note that even though BLS and μBLS deliver a signal proportional to the magnon intensity measured directly in the frequency domain, it is possible for both modes of operation to reconstruct the magnon’s phase and spatio-temporal evolution using additional equipment as described in details in ”