Cooperation of physicists in Kaiserslautern and Mainz demonstrates unidirectional wave propagation in a nano-scaled system

In ultra-thin magnetic multilayers, the so-called Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction can lead to a unidirectional propagation of spin waves. A team of physicists from Kaiserslautern (state research center OPTIMAS) and Mainz has successfully demonstrated such a behavior by means of Brillouin light scattering spectroscopy. Since this method allows to easily determine the strength of the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction, it is of high interest to various fields such as materials research, fundamentals of magnetism as well as the development of new logic devices based on the utilization of spin waves in information processing.

The work is the result of a collaboration between the workgroups of Prof. Hillebrands in Kaiserslautern and Prof. Kläui in Mainz. This research project is embedded in the collaborative research center Spin+X funded by the DFG and has been awarded the Best Poster Award at the recent IEEE International Magnetics Conference Intermag 2017 in Dublin.

Tobias Fischer, Frank Heussner, Samridh Jaiswal, Gerhard Jakob, Mathias Kläui, Burkard Hillebrands, and Philipp Pirro:

Spin waves in CoFeB thin films dominated by Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction