Sculpting Spin-Wave Landscapes via Curvature of 2D Magnonic Crystals

Original Abstract

Engineering the dispersion relation is one of the key ingredients enabling the application of spin waves in computational elements. One way to engineer the spin-wave band structure is to create an artificial magnonic crystal, which can be used to design specific band gaps or dispersion branches. However, creating a two-dimensional magnonic crystal usually requires removing material, which dramatically decreases the decay lengths of spin waves. Here, we present a method to manipulate the demagnetizing field landscape by utilizing large-area curvilinear nanotemplates consisting of three-dimensional nanopyramids arranged in a square lattice with a period of 400 nm. In a 50-nm-thick Permalloy film grown on these curvilinear templates, we experimentally observe a complete in-plane band gap together with flat-band modes that exhibit strong real-space localization of the spin waves in the pyramid valleys. Micro-focused Brillouin light scattering measurements corroborate the numerically predicted dispersion and reveal the possibility of opening and closing this gap by varying the external magnetic field. Our results establish three-dimensional-templated continuous films as a versatile platform for two-dimensional signal processing and magnonic computing elements.