Magnomechanical backaction corrections due to coupling to higher order Walker modes and Kerr nonlinearities

TL;DR

This paper investigates how higher order Walker modes and Kerr nonlinearities affect magnomechanical backaction in magnetic spheres, providing a refined model that aligns well with experimental observations.

Contribution

It introduces a corrected theoretical model accounting for additional magnon modes and nonlinearities, improving agreement with experimental data.

Findings

Corrected model matches experimental backaction data.

Walker modes couple similarly to the Kittel mode.

Kerr nonlinearities induce occupation-dependent corrections.

Abstract

The radiation pressure-like coupling between magnons and phonons in magnets can modify the phonon frequency (magnomechanical spring effect) and decay rate (magnomechanical decay) via dynamical backaction. Such effects have been recently observed by coupling the uniform magnon mode of a magnetic sphere (the Kittel mode) to a microwave cavity. In particular, the ability to evade backaction effects was demonstrated [C.A. Potts et al., arXiv:2211.13766 [quant-ph] (2022)], a requisite for applications such as magnomechanical based thermometry. However, deviations were observed from the predicted magnomechanical decay rate within the standard theoretical model. In this work, we account for these deviations by considering corrections due to (i) magnetic Kerr nonlinearities and (ii) the coupling of phonons to additional magnon modes. Provided that such additional modes couple weakly to the driven cavity, our model yields a correction proportional to the average Kittel magnon mode occupation. We focus our results on magnetic spheres, where we show that the magnetostatic Walker modes couple to the relevant mechanical modes as efficiently as the Kittel mode. Our model yields excellent agreement with the experimental data.