Tailoring spin wave channels in a reconfigurable artificial spin ice

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how reconfigurable artificial spin ice coupled with a soft magnetic underlayer can create tunable spin wave channels, advancing the development of reconfigurable magnonic crystals for data processing.

Contribution

It introduces a micromagnetic modeling approach to reconfigure spin wave channels in artificial spin ice systems with weakly interacting nanomagnets.

Findings

Reconfigurable spin wave channels are achieved via coupling to a soft magnetic underlayer.

Magnetic states of artificial spin ice influence the spin wave frequencies.

The system enables dynamic control of magnonic modes for potential logic applications.

Abstract

Artificial spin ices are ensembles of geometrically-arranged, interacting nanomagnets which have shown promising potential for the realization of reconfigurable magnonic crystals. Such systems allow for the manipulation of spin waves on the nanoscale and their potential use as information carriers. However, there are presently two general obstacles to the realization of artificial spin ice-based magnonic crystals: the magnetic state of artificial spin ices is difficult to reconfigure and the magnetostatic interactions between the nanoislands are often weak, preventing mode coupling. We demonstrate, using micromagnetic modeling, that coupling a reconfigurable artificial spin ice geometry made of weakly interacting nanomagnets to a soft magnetic underlayer creates a complex system exhibiting dynamically coupled modes. These give rise to spin wave channels in the underlayer at well-defined frequencies, based on the artificial spin ice magnetic state, which can be reconfigured. These findings open the door to the realization of reconfigurable magnonic crystals with potential applications for data transport and processing in magnonic-based logic architectures.