Magnonic Einstein-de Haas Effect: Ultrafast Rotation of Magnonic Microspheres

Magnons, collective spin excitations in magnetic crystals, have attracted much interest due to their ability to couple strongly to microwaves and other quantum systems. In compact magnetic crystals, we show that there are magnonic modes that can support orbital angular momentum and that these modes can be driven by linearly polarized microwave fields. Because of conservation of angular momentum, exciting such magnon modes induces a mechanical torque on the crystal. We study a levitated magnetic crystal, a yttrium iron garnet (YIG) microsphere, where such orbital angular momentum magnon modes are driven by microwaves held in a microwave high-Q microwave cavity. We find that the YIG sphere experiences a mechanical torque and can be spun up to ultralarge angular speeds exceeding 10 GHz.

Brillouin Light Scattering by Magnetic Quasivortices in Cavity Optomagnonics

A ferromagnetic sphere can support optical vortices in the form of whispering gallery modes and magnetic quasivortices in the form of magnetostatic modes with nontrivial spin textures. These vortices can be characterized by their orbital angular momenta. We experimentally investigate Brillouin scattering of photons in the whispering gallery modes by magnons in the magnetostatic modes, zeroing in on the exchange of the orbital angular momenta between the optical vortices and magnetic quasivortices. We find that the conservation of the orbital angular momentum results in different nonreciprocal behavior in the Brillouin light scattering. New avenues for chiral optics and optospintronics can be opened up by taking the orbital angular momenta as a new degree of freedom for cavity optomagnonics.

Helical-mode magnetostatic resonances in small ferrite particles and singular metamaterials

Small ferrite-disk particles with magnetostatic (magneto-dipole) oscillations are characterized by the topological-phase states-the vortex states. In a recently published paper (Kamenetskii et al 2010 Phys. Rev. A 81 053823), it was shown that such magnetic vortices act as traps, providing purely subwavelength confinement of electromagnetic fields. The symmetry properties of magnetostatic-vortex ferrite disks allow one to propose new-type subwavelength microwave structures. In this paper it is demonstrated that the unique topological properties of the fields in a ferrite disk are intimately related to the symmetry breaking effects of magnetostatic oscillations. This analysis is based on postulates about a physical meaning of the magnetostatic-potential function ψ(r, t) as a complex scalar wavefunction, which presumes a long-range phase coherence in magnetic dipole-dipole interactions. The proper solutions are found based on an analysis of magnetostatic-wave propagation in a helical coordinate system. It is shown that while a composition of two helical waves may acquire a geometrical phase over-running of 2π during a period, every separate helical wave has a dynamical phase over-running of π and so behaves as a double-valued function. This results in the appearance of helical-mode magnetostatic resonances in quasi-2D ferrite disks. The solutions give magnetostatic-wave power-flow-density vortices with cores at the disk center and azimuthally running waves of magnetization. The near fields of magnetostatic-vortex ferrite-disk particles are characterized by space-time symmetry violation. For incident electromagnetic waves, such particles, with sizes much less than the free-space electromagnetic wavelength, appear as local singular regions. From the properties of a composition of magnetostatic-vortex ferrite-disk particles, one may propose novel metamaterials-singular metamaterials.