Qin, H. J., Zakeri Lori, K., Ernst, A., Sandratskii, L. M., Buczek, P., Marmodoro, A., Chuang, T.-H., Zhang, Y., Kirschner, J.
Long-living terahertz magnons in ultrathin metallic ferromagnets
Nature Communications 6, pp 6126/1-8 (2015)
The main idea behind magnonics is to use the elementary magnetic excitations (magnons)
for information transfer and processing. One of the main challenges, hindering the application
of ultrafast terahertz magnons in magnonics, has been the short lifetime of these excitations
in metallic ferromagnets. Here, we demonstrate that the engineering of the electronic
structure of a ferromagnetic metal, by reducing its dimensionality and changing its chemical
composition, opens a possibility to strongly suppress the relaxation channels of terahertz
magnons and thereby enhance the magnons\'lifetime. For the first time, we report on the
long-lived terahertz magnons excited in ultrathin metallic alloy films. On the basis of the
first-principles calculations, we explain the microscopic nature of the long lifetime being a
consequence of the peculiar electronic hybridizations of the species. We further demonstrate
a way of tailoring magnon energies (frequencies) by varying the chemical composition of
the film.
TH-2015-01