An ensemble of magnons, quanta of spin waves, can be prepared as a Bose gas of weakly interacting quasiparticles. Furthermore, the thermalization of the overpopulated magnon gas through magnon-magnon scattering processes, which conserve the number of particles, can lead to the formation of a Bose-Einstein condensate at the bottom of a spin-wave spectrum. However, magnon-phonon scattering can significantly modify this scenario and new quasiparticles are formed-magnetoelastic bosons.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe present spatially resolved measurements of the magnon temperature in a magnetic insulator subject to a thermal gradient. Our data reveal an unexpectedly close correspondence between the spatial dependencies of the exchange magnon and phonon temperatures. These results indicate that if--as is currently thought--the transverse spin Seebeck effect is caused by a temperature difference between the magnon and phonon baths, it must be the case that the magnon temperature is spectrally nonuniform and that the effect is driven by the sparsely populated dipolar region of the magnon spectrum.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBose-Einstein condensation of quasi-particles such as excitons, polaritons, magnons and photons is a fascinating quantum mechanical phenomenon. Unlike the Bose-Einstein condensation of real particles (like atoms), these processes do not require low temperatures, since the high densities of low-energy quasi-particles needed for the condensate to form can be produced via external pumping. Here we demonstrate that such a pumping can create remarkably high effective temperatures in a narrow spectral region of the lowest energy states in a magnon gas, resulting in strikingly unexpected transitional dynamics of Bose-Einstein magnon condensate: the density of the condensate increases immediately after the external magnon flow is switched off and initially decreases if it is switched on again.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMicrowave emission from a parametrically pumped ferrimagnetic film of yttrium iron garnet was studied versus the magnon density evolution, which was detected by Brillouin light scattering spectroscopy. It has been found that the shutdown of external microwave pumping leads to an unexpected effect: The conventional monotonic decrease of the population of parametrically injected magnons is accompanied by an explosive behavior of electromagnetic radiation at the magnon frequency. The developed theory shows that this explosion is caused by a nonlinear energy transfer from parametrically driven short-wavelength dipolar-exchange magnons to a long-wavelength dipolar magnon mode effectively coupled to an electromagnetic wave.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNano-structuring can significantly modify the properties of materials. We demonstrate that size-dependent modification of the spin-wave spectra in magnetic nano-particles can affect not only linear, but also nonlinear magnetic response. The discretization of the spectrum removes the frequency degeneracy between the main excitation mode of a nano-particle and the higher spin-wave modes, having the lowest magnetic damping, and reduces the strength of multi-magnon relaxation processes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPhilos Trans A Math Phys Eng Sci
September 2011
Spin waves are delocalized excitations of magnetic media that mainly determine their magnetic dynamics and thermodynamics at temperatures far below the critical one. The quantum-mechanical counterparts of spin waves are magnons, which can be considered as a gas of weakly interacting bosonic quasi-particles. Here, we discuss the room-temperature kinetics and thermodynamics of the magnon gas in yttrium iron garnet films driven by parametric microwave pumping.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBose-Einstein condensation in a gas of magnons pumped by an incoherent pumping source is experimentally studied at room temperature. We demonstrate that the condensation can be achieved in a gas of bosons under conditions of incoherent pumping. The critical transition point is shown to be almost independent of the frequency spectrum of the pumping source and is solely determined by the density of magnons.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUsing a novel technique providing simultaneous resolution with respect to the wave vector and frequency of magnons, we observed the formation of a Bose-Einstein condensate documented by the narrowing of the magnon distribution in phase space. Based on the measured width of the distribution we determined the effective correlation length of the condensate, which appears to be anisotropic, reflecting the anisotropy of the magnon dispersion spectrum.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe room-temperature dynamics of a magnon gas driven by short microwave pumping pulses is studied. An overpopulation of the lowest energy level of the system following the pumping is observed. Using the sensitivity of the Brillouin light scattering technique to the coherence degree of the scattering magnons we demonstrate the spontaneous emergence of coherence of the magnons at the lowest level, if their density exceeds a critical value.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe demonstrate that a microwave signal carried by a packet of dipolar spin waves propagating in a tangentially magnetized magnetic film can be stored in the form of standing dipole-exchange spin-wave modes of the film and can be recovered by means of a double-frequency parametric pumping mechanism. This mechanism is based on the parametric amplification of the standing (thickness) modes of the film by external pumping. The time of recovery, duration, and power of the recovered pulse signal are controlled by the power of the pumping signal.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe thermalization of parametrically pumped magnons caused by nonlinear multimagnon scattering processes and leading to the magnon Bose-Einstein condensation is investigated experimentally with high temporal resolution. The threshold pumping power necessary for the thermalization is determined. For pumping powers above this threshold the thermalization time has been found to decrease rapidly with power reaching the value down to 50 ns, which is much smaller than the magnon lifetime.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBose-Einstein condensation is one of the most fascinating phenomena predicted by quantum mechanics. It involves the formation of a collective quantum state composed of identical particles with integer angular momentum (bosons), if the particle density exceeds a critical value. To achieve Bose-Einstein condensation, one can either decrease the temperature or increase the density of bosons.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPhys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys
June 2001
The interaction of a propagating wave packet (carrier frequency omega, wave number k) with nonadiabatic parametric pumping, localized in a region of size the order of the carrier wavelength L approximately lambda=2pi/k, is studied experimentally in a system of dipolar spin waves in a ferrite film. It is shown that the three-wave parametric interaction omega+omega(')=omega(p) leads to the formation of both contrapropagating (k(')=-k) and copropagating (k(')=k) idle wave packets of carrier frequency omega('). A system of equations derived for the packet envelopes gives a quantitative description of the observed random modulation of the output signal caused by the interference of the input and copropagating idle wave packets.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA new phenomenon of momentum relaxation reversal has been discovered experimentally and explained theoretically for dipolar spin waves in magnetic garnet films. It is shown that the process of momentum relaxation, caused by the scattering of a signal wave on defects, can be reversed, and the signal can be restituted after it left the scattering region. The reversal of momentum relaxation is achieved by frequency-selective parametric amplification of a narrow band of scattered waves having low group velocities and frequencies close to the frequency of the original signal wave.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe effects of wave front reversal and inversion of the time profile are observed experimentally for a dipolar spin wave pulse (carrier frequency omega(1)) interacting in a yttrium-iron garnet film with a weakly localized nonstationary parametric pumping (carrier frequency omega(p) congruent with 2omega(1)) in a three-wave process with conservation law omega(p) = omega(1)+omega(2), where omega(2) is the carrier frequency of the reversed pulse. Theoretical analysis based on the solution of the system of equations for envelopes of interacting wave packets by means of a Green's function formalism gives a quantitative description of the observed phenomena.
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