Symmetry breaking induced magnon-magnon coupling in synthetic antiferromagnets

Abstract

We propose a general theory of microwave absorption spectroscopy for symmetry-breaking synthetic antiferromagnets (SAFs). Generally, inhomogeneity or different thickness of the two ferromagnetic sublayers of a SAF results in the intrinsic symmetry breaking, while out-of-plane components of dc magnetic fields lead to the extrinsic one. The broken symmetry of SAFs excludes the original symmetry-protected crossing between pure in-phase and out-of-phase resonance modes with opposite parity. Alternatively, new frequency branches become hybridization of original bare modes in terms of symmetry-breaking-induced magnon-magnon coupling, which results in an indirect gap in ferromagnetic resonance frequencies. Also, the dependence of gap width on the degree of symmetry breaking for several typical cases are presented and compared with existing experiments. Our theory provides a simple but physical understanding on the rich structure of ferromagnetic resonance spectra for asymmetric SAFs.