Nonreciprocal magnon propagation has recently become a highly potential approach of developing chip-embedded microwave isolators for advanced information processing. However, it is challenging to achieve large nonreciprocity in miniaturized magnetic thin-film devices because of the difficulty of distinguishing propagating surface spin waves along the opposite directions when the film thickness is small. In this work, we experimentally realize unidirectional microwave transduction with sub-micrometer-wavelength propagating magnons in a yttrium iron garnet (YIG) thin-film delay line. We achieve a non-decaying isolation of 30 dB with a broad field-tunable bandpass frequency range up to 14 GHz. The large isolation is due to the selection of chiral magnetostatic surface spin waves with the Oersted field generated from the coplanar waveguide antenna. Increasing the geometry ratio between the antenna width and YIG thickness drastically reduces the nonreciprocity and introduces additional magnon transmission bands. Our results pave the way for on-chip microwave isolation and tunable delay line with short-wavelength magnonic excitations.
Spin waves, collective dynamic magnetic excitations, offer crucial insights into magnetic material properties. Rare‐earth iron garnets offer an ideal spin‐wave (SW) platform with long propagation length, short wavelength, gigahertz frequency, and applicability to magnon spintronic platforms. Of particular interest, thulium iron garnet (TmIG) has attracted huge interest recently due to its successful growth down to a few nanometers, observed topological Hall effect, and spin‐orbit torque‐induced switching effects. However, there is no direct spatial measurement of its SW properties. This work uses diamond nitrogen‐vacancy (NV) magnetometry in combination with SW electrical transmission spectroscopy to study SW transport properties in TmIG thin films. NV magnetometry allows probing spin waves at the sub‐micrometer scale, seen by the amplification of the local microwave magnetic field due to the coupling of NV spin qubits with the stray magnetic field produced by the microwave‐excited spin waves. By monitoring the NV spin resonances, the SW properties in TmIG thin films are measured as a function of the applied magnetic field, including their amplitude, decay length (≈50 µm), and wavelength (0.8–2 µm). These results pave the way for studying spin qubit‐magnon interactions in rare‐earth magnetic insulators, relevant to quantum magnonics applications.
more » « less- Award ID(s):
- 2044049
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10480015
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Advanced Electronic Materials
- ISSN:
- 2199-160X
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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