Theory Department
Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics
1997    
1998    
1999    
2000    
2001    
2002    
2003    
2004    
2005    
2006    
2007    
2008    
2009    
2010    
2011    
2012    
2013    
2014    
2015    
2016    
2017    
2018    
2019    
2020    
2021    
Hofherr, M., Häuser, S., Dewhurst, J. K., Tengdin, P., Sakshath, S., Nembach, H. T., Weber, S. T., Shaw, J. M., Silva, T. J., Kapteyn, H. C., Cinchetti, M., Rethfeld, B., Murnane, M. M., Steil, D., Stadtmüller, B., Sharma, S., Aeschlimann, M., Mathias, S.

Ultrafast optically induced spin transfer in ferromagnetic alloys
Science Advances 6, (3),pp eaay8717/1-7 (2020)
The vision of using light to manipulate electronic and spin excitations in materials on their fundamental time and length scales requires new approaches in experiment and theory to observe and understand these excitations. The ultimate speed limit for all-optical manipulation requires control schemes for which the electronic or magnetic subsystems of the materials are coherently manipulated on the time scale of the laser excitation pulse. In our work, we provide experimental evidence of such a direct, ultrafast, and coherent spin transfer between two magnetic subsystems of an alloy of Fe and Ni. Our experimental findings are fully supported by time-dependent density functional theory simulations and, hence, suggest the possibility of coherently controlling spin dynamics on subfemtosecond time scales, i.e., the birth of the research area of attomagnetism.