Oxide magnonics: Spin waves in functional magnetic oxides

Abstract

Spin waves or their quanta magnons are collective excitations in magnetically ordered materials. Magnonics have recently attracted tremendous interest for building next-generation nanoscale devices and circuits with low-power consumption. Oxide materials provide an excellent platform for achieving highly efficient spin-wave excitation and transmission for magnonic applications with versatile functionalities. In this article, we review some recent advances for oxide-based magnonics, including both magnetic oxides for hosting spin waves and non-magnetic oxides for manipulating spin waves. First, we introduce recent development on coherent propagation and incoherent transport of magnons in thin-film iron garnets, low-damping ferrimagnetic oxides widely used in magnonics. Then, we discuss spin-wave chirality due to the inversion symmetry broken in magnetic oxides. Magnonics in antiferromagnetic oxides is also presented, where the spin-wave resonance frequency enters THz regime. Nanoscale spin textures, such as magnetic skyrmions, can be stabilized in magnetic oxides, and provide additional versatilities by coupling their dynamics with spin waves. Last but not the least, we highlight the electrical control of spin waves based on multiferroic oxides toward applications for hybrid magnonics.