Dynamic instabilitiy in high power FMR of BiYIG nanodisks

Abstract

One current goal of spintronics is the development of sustainable information technology based on pure spin currents. One promising way to do this is to use spin waves (SWs) in low damping insulating ferrimagnets like yttrium iron garnet (YIG) where relaxation can be controlled by spin orbit torque (SOT) at a heavy metal interface [1]. However, such metal/insulator hybrid devices exhibit saturation of SW amplification due to nonlinear coupling between modes [2].Two strategies can be considered to overcome these issues. i) Nanopatterning leads to quantization of SW modes [3], thereby limiting the available nonlinear processes [4]. ii) Tuning the perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (PMA) can be used to control the sign of the nonlinear frequency shift [5]. Recently, the growth of ultra-thin films of bismuth doped YIG (BiYIG) with tunable PMA has been achieved [6], resulting in greatly improved characteristics of SOT emitted SWs [7].Here, we study the magnetization dynamics in individual nanodisks patterned from such a 30 nm thick BiYIG film with submicron diameters. The static magnetic field is perpendicular to the plane. The in-plane microwave field is produced by an integrated antenna. To detect the FMR, we employ a magnetic resonance force microscope [8]. For the largest disks, the amplitude of the FMR peak quickly saturates as the excitation power is increased, which is accompanied by a strong distortion of the absorption line, that broadens and splits into several peaks (Fig1a). Micromagnetic simulations accurately reproduce these features and reveal that a dynamic instability is responsible for the observed behavior. To experimentally probe this complex dynamics, we apply a second, much weaker excitation field of varying frequency, in addition to the main driving field at high power. The frequency modulation spectrum obtained (Fig1b) reflects the existence of rich low-frequency temporal variations in the magnetization dynamics.  Fig 1. (a) Resonance line in the deeply nonlinear regime. (b) Two-tone spectroscopy performed inside the instability region, at μ0Hz = 165 mT.