Anisotropic microwave propagation in a reconfigurable chiral spin soliton lattice

Abstract

We investigated microwave propagation in the chiral spin soliton lattice (CSL) phase of micrometer-sized crystals of the monoaxial chiral helimagnet ${\mathrm{CrNb}}_{3}{\mathrm{S}}_{6}$. An advantage of the CSL is that its periodicity can be reconfigured over a macroscopic length scale by means of an external magnetic field. Using a two-antenna microwave spectroscopy technique, we measured the anisotropic response of the transmitted microwaves via the spin dynamics of the CSL. When propagating along the direction parallel to the helical axis, the microwave amplitude increased up to a factor of twenty with decreasing the number of chiral soliton kinks. When the propagation direction was rotated by ${90}^{\ensuremath{\circ}}$ with regards to the helical axis, the microwave amplitude increased by one order of magnitude upon formation of the chiral helimagnetic order in the vicinity of zero magnetic field, exceeding that of the ferromagnetic phase above the critical field. Our findings open a novel route for controlling the characteristics of microwave propagation using noncollinear spin textures.