Speaker
Steven Johnson
(Paul Scherrer Institut)
Description
We report on an experimental demonstration of the ultrafast switching of magnetic order in a single crystal of CuO. In the experiment, a femtosecond laser pulse initiates a transition from a collinear antiferromagentic structure to a spiral, multiferroic magnetic structure. The first steps occur on time scales ranging from 400 fs to 2 ps, depending on the strength of the excitation. At the strongest excitation levels, the time scale is limited by the period of long-wavelength magnetic excitations in CuO. This has implications for the design of devices that rely upon high speed control over magnetism, particularly in multiferroic materials.
Author
Steven Johnson
(Paul Scherrer Institut)
Co-authors
Andrew Boothroyd
(Oxford)
Andrin Caviezel
(PSI)
Dharmalingam Prabhakaran
(Oxford)
Dionisio Doering
(LBNL)
Donghui Lu
(SLAC)
Ekaterina Vorobeva
(PSI)
Gerhard Ingold
(PSI)
Joshua Turner
(SLAC)
Luc Patthey
(PSI)
Mariano Trigo
(SLAC)
Ming Yi
(Stanford)
Oleg Krupin
(SLAC and XFEL)
Patrick Kirchman
(SLAC)
Paul Beaud
(PSI)
Peter Denes
(LBNL)
Raquel de Souza
(PSI)
Robert Moore
(SLAC)
Urs Staub
(PSI)
Valerio Scagnoli
(PSI)
Wei-Sheng Lee
(SLAC)
William Schlotter
(SLAC)
Yi-De Chuang
(LBNL)
Zahid Hussain
(LBNL)
Zhi-Xun Shen
(Stanford and SLAC)
