Perspective: Ultrafast magnetism and THz spintronics

By J. Walowski, M. Münzenberg. 2016

326 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This year the discovery of femtosecond demagnetization by laser pulses is 20 years old. For the first time this milestone work by Bigot and coworkers gave insight in a very direct way into the time scales of microscopic interactions that connect the spin and electron system. While intense discussions in the field were fueled by the complexity of the processes in the past, it now became evident that it is a puzzle of many different parts. Rather than giving an overview that has been presented in previous reviews on ultrafast processes in ferromagnets, this perspective will show that with our current depth of knowledge the first real applications are on their way: THz spintronics and all-optical spin manipulation are becoming more and more feasible. The aim of this perspective is to point out where we can connect the different puzzle pieces of understanding gathered over 20 years to develop novel applications. based on many observations in a large number of experiments. Differences in the theoretical models arise from the localized and delocalized nature of ferromagnetism. Transport effects are intrinsically non-local in spintronic devices and at interfaces. We review the need for multiscale modeling to address processes starting from electronic excitation of the spin system on the picometer length scale and sub-femtosecond time scale, to spin wave generation, and towards the modeling of ultrafast phase transitions that altogether determine the response time of the ferromagnetic system. Today, our current understanding gives rise to the first real applications of ultrafast spin physics for ultrafast magnetism control: THz spintronic devices. This makes the field of ultrafast spin-dynamics an emerging topic open for many researchers right now.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Condensed Matter Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7f1c76430701f6c5aba20a9a83361cb233dae9c5

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Condensed Matter Physics

Citations in the corpus

Colloquium: Nonthermal pathways to ultrafast control in quantum materials (2021, background): “…al., 2021) and polarization rotations that are sensitive to changes in magnetic orders (Beaurepaire et al., 1996; Kirilyuk, Kimel, and Rasing, 2010; Walowski and Münzenberg, 2016; Němec et al., 2018; Schlauderer et al., 2019; Kimel et al., 2020), (iii) the integrability with other external…”
Cavity magnonics (2021, methodology): “Optical techniques such as Kerr-Faraday rotation spectroscopy, inelastic light scattering (Demokritov and Demidov, 2008; Sebastian et al., 2015) and ultrafast 33 pump-and-probe techniques (Walowski and Münzenberg, 2016) are well-established probes of magnetism.”