Dispersion Relation of Nutation Surface Spin Waves in Ferromagnets

Abstract

Recently, it has been theoretically and experimentally demonstrated that the effects of inertia of magnetization should be considered in the full description of spin dynamics at pico- and femtosecond timescales [1-8]. The nutation motion of magnetization is a manifestation of inertia of the magnetic moments. A rigorous derivation including inertia in the Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert equation was carried out by Mondal et al. in the Dirac-Kohn-Sham framework [6,7].Here, we show that inertia effect in magnetization dynamics results in a new type of spin waves, i.e. nutation surface spin waves, which propagate at terahertz frequencies in in-plane magnetized ferromagnetic thin films. Considering the magnetostatic limit, i.e. neglecting exchange coupling, we calculate dispersion relation. In addition, we find that the nutation surface spin waves are backward spin waves [1].The phase shift between precessing magnetic moments propagates as a spin wave through the ferromagnet because of dipole-dipole or exchange coupling (Fig. 1(a)). Magnetic inertia effects, which are expected to contribute to dynamics of spin waves, originate from spin-orbit coupling. We find that when taking inertia into account one finds that the deviation of alignment of localized moments will propagate through the spin system in the form of both precession and nutation motions, i.e. in ferromagnetic materials one needs to add to all “conventional” spin wave modes a high frequency wave-like motion with small amplitude caused by inertia. Moreover, a different type of waves having predominantly inertial nature appears in ferromagnetic thin films, which we call here nutation surface spin waves. Since these waves have terahertz frequencies (compared to typically GHz frequencies of other spin wave modes), they can be plotted as a small deviation on top of a “frozen” precession motion (Fig. 1(b)).  Fig. 1. (a) The precession spin wave without inertia (red curve). The blue arrow indicates the motion of the magnetization M. (b) The nutation surface spin wave (purple curve) with a frequency considerably higher than in (a) plotted with small blue circles on top of the “frozen” precession motion.