Resonant subwavelength control of the phase of spin waves reflected from a Gires-Tournois interferometer.

Subwavelength resonant elements are essential building blocks of metamaterials and metasurfaces, which have revolutionized photonics. Despite similarities between different wave phenomena, other types of interactions can make subwavelength coupling significantly distinct; its investigation in their context is therefore of interest both from the physics and applications perspective. In this work, we demonstrate a fully magnonic Gires-Tournois interferometer based on a subwavelength resonator made of a narrow ferromagnetic stripe lying above the edge of a ferromagnetic film. The bilayer formed by the stripe and the film underneath supports two propagative spin-wave modes, one strongly coupled with spin waves propagating in the rest of the film and another almost completely reflected at the ends of the bilayer. When the Fabry-Perot resonance conditions for this mode are satisfied, the weak coupling between both modes is sufficient to achieve high sensitivity of the phase of waves reflected from the resonator to the stripe width and, more interestingly, also to the stripe-film separation. Such spin-wave phase manipulation capabilities are a prerequisite for the design of spin-wave metasurfaces and may stimulate development of magnonic logic devices and sensors detecting magnetic nanoparticles.

Spin-Wave Phase Inverter upon a Single Nanodefect.

Local modification of magnetic properties of nanoelements is a key to design future-generation magnonic devices in which information is carried and processed via spin waves. One of the biggest challenges here is to fabricate simple and miniature phase-controlling elements with broad tunability. Here, we successfully realize such spin-wave phase shifters upon a single nanogroove milled by a focused ion beam in a Co-Fe microsized magnonic waveguide. By varying the groove depth and the in-plane bias magnetic field, we continuously tune the spin-wave phase and experimentally evidence a complete phase inversion. The microscopic mechanism of the phase shift is based on the combined action of the nanogroove as a geometrical defect and the lower spin-wave group velocity in the waveguide under the groove where the magnetization is reduced due to the incorporation of Ga ions during the ion-beam milling. The proposed phase shifter can easily be on-chip integrated with spin-wave logic gates and other magnonic devices. Our findings are crucial for designing nanomagnonic circuits and for the development of spin-wave nano-optics.

Hartman effect for spin waves in exchange regime.

Hartman effect for spin waves tunnelling through a barrier in a thin magnetic film is considered theoretically. The barrier is assumed to be created by a locally increased magnetic anisotropy field. The considerations are focused on a nanoscale system operating in the exchange-dominated regime. We derive the formula for group delay τgr of a spin wave packet and show that τgr saturates with increasing barrier width, which is a signature of the Hartman effect predicted earlier for photonic and electronic systems. In our calculations, we consider the general boundary conditions which take into account different strength of exchange coupling between the barrier and its surrounding. As a system suitable for experimental observation of the Hartman effect we propose a CoFeB layer with perpendicular magnetic anisotropy induced by a MgO overlayer.