Tuning spin wave modes in yttrium iron garnet films with stray fields

Abstract

The nanopatterning of Yttrium Iron Garnets (YIGs) has proven to be a non-trivial problem even with advances in modern lithography techniques due to non-compatibility with a conventional complementary metal oxide semiconductor platform. In an attempt to circumvent this problem, we demonstrate a simple and reliable method to indirectly pattern YIG films on a Gadolinium Gallium Garnet (GGG) substrate. We fabricated exchange-coupled arrays of Py dots onto the underlying YIG films using nanostencil lithography. The stray fields generated from the Py dots were used to transfer patterned magnetic information to the underlying YIG films. The static and dynamic properties of the fabricated hybrid YIG/Py dot structure and reference YIG film were characterized using the focused magneto-optic Kerr effect and by broadband ferromagnetic resonance spectroscopy. For the reference YIG film, as expected, a single field-dependent resonance mode with a narrow linewidth was observed in contrast to the splitting into three distinct resonance modes for the YIG/Py dot structure as predicted by micromagnetic simulations. We have thus shown that it is possible to utilize stray field effects from easily patternable magnetic materials for the development of future YIG-based magnonic devices.