Magnonics is a budding research field in nanomagnetism and nanoscience that addresses the use of spin waves (magnons) to transmit, store, and process information. The rapid advancements of this field during last one decade in terms of upsurge in research papers, review articles, citations, proposals of devices as well as introduction of new sub-topics prompted us to present the first roadmap on magnonics. This is a collection of 22 sections written by leading experts in this field who review and discuss the current status besides presenting their vision of future perspectives. Today, the principal challenges in applied magnonics are the excitation of sub-100 nm wavelength magnons, their manipulation on the nanoscale and the creation of sub-micrometre devices using low-Gilbert damping magnetic materials and its interconnections to standard electronics. To this end, magnonics offers lower energy consumption, easier integrability and compatibility with CMOS structure, reprogrammability, shorter wavelength, smaller device features, anisotropic properties, negative group velocity, non-reciprocity and efficient tunability by various external stimuli to name a few. Hence, despite being a young research field, magnonics has come a long way since its early inception. This roadmap asserts a milestone for future emerging research directions in magnonics, and hopefully, it will inspire a series of exciting new articles on the same topic in the coming years.
We experimentally demonstrate magnetic nano-oscillators driven by pure spin current produced by the spin Hall effect in a bow tie-shaped nanoconstriction. These devices exhibit single-mode auto-oscillation and generate highly-coherent electronic microwave signals with a significant power and the spectral linewidth as low as 6.2 MHz at room temperature. The proposed simple and flexible device geometry is amenable to straightforward implementation of advanced spintronic structures such as chains of mutually coupled spin-Hall nano-oscillators.
Interfacial Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interaction (DMI) is experimentally investigated in Pt/Co/Pt multilayer films under strain. A strong variation (from 0.1 to ) of the DMI constant is demonstrated at in-plane uniaxial deformation of the films. The anisotropic strain induces strong DMI anisotropy. The DMI constant perpendicular to the strain direction changes sign, while the constant along the strain direction does not. Estimates show that the DMI can be controlled with an electric field in hybrid ferroelectric-ferromagnetic systems. So, the observed effect opens the way to control the DMI and eventually skyrmions with a voltage via a strain-mediated magnetoelectric coupling.
Magnetic skyrmions are topologically non-trivial nanoscale objects. Their topology, which originates in their chiral domain wall winding, governs their unique response to a motion-inducing force. When subjected to an electrical current, the chiral winding of the spin texture leads to a deflection of the skyrmion trajectory, characterised by an angle with respect to the applied force direction. This skyrmion Hall angle is predicted to be skyrmion diameter-dependent. In contrast, our experimental study finds that the skyrmion Hall angle is diameter-independent for skyrmions with diameters ranging from 35 to 825 nm. At an average velocity of 6 ± 1 ms−1, the average skyrmion Hall angle was measured to be 9° ± 2°. In fact, the skyrmion dynamics is dominated by the local energy landscape such as materials defects and the local magnetic configuration.
Magnonics explores precessional excitations of ordered spins in magnetic materials—so-called spin waves—and their use as information and signal carriers within networks of magnonic waveguides. Here, we demonstrate that the nonuniformity of the internal magnetic field and magnetization inherent to magnetic structures creates a medium of graded refractive index for propagating magnetostatic waves and can be used to steer their propagation. The character of the nonuniformity can be tuned and potentially programmed using the applied magnetic field, which opens exciting prospects for the field of graded-index magnonics.