A new advanced space- and time-resolved Brillouin light scattering technique is used to study diffraction of two-dimensional beams and pulses of dipolar spin waves excited by strip-line antennas in tangentially magnetized garnet films. The technique is an effective tool for investigations of two-dimensional spin wave propagation with high spatial and temporal resolution. Nonlinear effects such as stationary and nonstationary self-focusing are investigated in detail. It is shown, that nonlinear diffraction of a stationary backward volume magnetostatic wave (BVMSW) beam, having a finite transverse aperture, leads to selffocusing of the beam at one spatial point. Diffraction of a finite-duration (non-stationary) BVMSW pulse leads to space-time self-focusing and formation of a strongly localized two-dimensional wave packet (spin wave bullet).
We report on investigations of the crystallographic structure and the magnetic anisotropies of epitaxial iron films deposited onto periodically stepped Ag(001) surfaces using low energy electron diffraction, x-ray diffraction, second harmonic generation (SHG), as well as the Brillouin light scattering (BLS) technique. The focus of the present study lies on the interrelation between the surface morphology of the buffer layers and the magnetic properties of the Fe films, epitaxially grown onto them. Especially the symmetry breaking at the atomic steps is found to create an uniaxial magnetic anisotropy measured by BLS and a very strong anisotropic signal in magnetic SHG.
The first observation of spatiotemporal self-focusing of spin waves is reported. The experimental results are obtained for dipolar spin waves in yttrium-iron-garnet films by means of a newly developed space- and time-resolved Brillouin light scattering technique. They demonstrate self-focusing of a moving wave pulse in two spatial dimensions, and formation of localized two-dimensional wave packets, the collapse of which is stopped by dissipation. The experimental results are in good qualitative agreement with numerical simulations.
We report on the exchange bias effect as a function of the in-plane direction of the applied field in twofold symmetric, epitaxial Ni 80 Fe 20 /Fe 50 Mn 50 bilayers grown on Cu~110! single-crystal substrates. An enhancement of the exchange bias field, H eb , up to a factor of 2 is observed if the external field is nearly, but not fully aligned perpendicular to the symmetry direction of the exchange bias field. From the measurement of the exchange bias field as a function of the in-plane angle of the applied field, the unidirectional, uniaxial and fourfold anisotropy contributions are determined with high precision. The symmetry direction of the unidirectional anisotropy switches with increasing NiFe thickness from [110] to [001].