Coherent Excitation of Heterosymmetric Spin Waves with Ultrashort Wavelengths

In the emerging field of magnonics, spin waves are foreseen as signal carriers for future spintronic information processing and communication devices, owing to both the very low power losses and a high device miniaturization potential predicted for short-wavelength spin waves. Yet, the efficient excitation and controlled propagation of nanoscale spin waves remains a severe challenge. Here, we report the observation of high-amplitude, ultrashort dipole-exchange spin waves (down to 80 nm wavelength at 10 GHz frequency) in a ferromagnetic single layer system, coherently excited by the driven dynamics of a spin vortex core. We used time-resolved x-ray microscopy to directly image such propagating spin waves and their excitation over a wide range of frequencies. By further analysis, we found that these waves exhibit a heterosymmetric mode profile, involving regions with anti-Larmor precession sense and purely linear magnetic oscillation. In particular, this mode profile consists of dynamic vortices with laterally alternating helicity, leading to a partial magnetic flux closure over the film thickness, which is explained by a strong and unexpected mode hybridization. This spin-wave phenomenon observed is a general effect inherent to the dynamics of sufficiently thick ferromagnetic single layer films, independent of the specific excitation method employed

A planet within the debris disk around the pre-main-sequence star AU Microscopii

Stars and planetary system

Seeding and Emergence of Composite Skyrmions in a van der Waals Magnet

Topological charge plays a significant role in a range of physical systems. In particular, observations of real space topological objects in magnetic materials have been largely limited to skyrmions states with a unitary topological charge. Recently, more exotic states with varying topology, such as antiskyrmions, merons, or bimerons and 3D states such as skyrmion strings, chiral bobbers, and hopfions, have been experimentally reported. Along these lines, the realization of states with higher order topology has the potential to open new avenues of research in topological magnetism and its spintronic applications. Here, real space imaging of such spin textures, including skyrmion, skyrmionium, skyrmion bag, and skyrmion sack states, observed in exfoliated flakes of the van der Waals magnet Fe3 amp; 8722;xGeTe2 FGT is reported. These composite skyrmions may emerge from seeded, loop like states condensed into the stripe domain structure, demonstrating the possibility to realize spin textures with arbitrary integer topological charge within exfoliated flakes of 2D magnets. The general nature of the formation mechanism motivates the search for composite skyrmion states in both well known and new magnetic materials, which may yet reveal an even richer spectrum of higher order topological object