Experimental Demonstration of a Rowland Spectrometer for Spin Waves

TL;DR

This paper experimentally demonstrates a spin-wave Rowland spectrometer that uses a diffraction grating to spatially separate spectral components, advancing on-chip spin-wave optical device technology.

Contribution

It introduces a novel spin-wave spectrometer using a diffraction grating fabricated by focused-ion-beam irradiation, enabling spectral separation on a chip-scale.

Findings

Successful creation of a spin-wave diffraction grating on YIG

Spectral components spatially separated by interference pattern

Potential for complex on-chip spin-wave optical devices

Abstract

We experimentally demonstrate the operation of a spin-wave Rowland spectrometer. In the proposed device geometry, spin waves are coherently excited on a diffraction grating and form an interference pattern that spatially separates spectral components of the incoming signal. The diffraction grating was created by focused-ion-beam irradiation, which was found to locally eliminate the ferrimagnetic properties of YIG, without removing the material. We found that in our experiments spin waves were created by an indirect mechanism, by exploiting nonlinear resonance between the grating and the coplanar waveguide. Our work paves the way for complex spin-wave optic devices -- chips that replicate the functionality of integrated optical devices on a chip-scale.