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MA: Fachverband Magnetismus

MA 41: Focus: All-optical magnetic switching

MA 41.2: Invited Talk

Thursday, March 19, 2015, 10:15–10:45, H 1012

All optical control of magnetic thin films and nanostructures — •Eric Fullerton — University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0401 USA

The possibilities of manipulating magnetization without applied magnetic fields have attracted growing attention over the last fifteen years with implications for future magnetic information memory and storage technologies. I will discuss recent experiments on the optical manipulation of the magnetization of engineered materials and devices using 100-fs to 10-ns optical pulses. We demonstrate that all optical switching can be observed in a broad range of materials and not limited to selected rare-earth transition-metal alloy films as had been previously observed. We observe all optical switching in a variety of engineered materials, including ferrimagnetic alloys, multilayers, heterostructures and rare-earth-free Co-Ir-based synthetic ferrimagnets [1] and most recently observe optical control of ferromagnetic films and nanostructures [2]. The latter discovery could potentially enable breakthroughs for numerous applications since it exploits materials that are currently used in magnetic data storage, memories and logic technologies. This work is supported, in part, by the ONR MURI program and is in collaboration with M. Gottwald, R. Medapalli, C.-H. Lambert, R. Tolley, V. Uhlir, and Y. Fainman at UCSD, S. Alebrand, D. Steil, M. Cinchetti and M. Aeschlimann at University of Kaiserslautern, M. Hehn, D. Lacour and S. Mangin at Université de Lorraine and Y. Takahashi and K. Hono at NIMS in Japan. [1]. Mangin et al., Nature Materials 13, 286, (2014). [2]. Lambert et al., Science 345, 1337 (2014).