Dresden 2026 – scientific programme
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MA: Fachverband Magnetismus
MA 14: PhD Focus Session: What about the lattice? Lessons from (ultrafast) magnetism
MA 14.1: Invited Talk
Tuesday, March 10, 2026, 09:35–10:20, HSZ/0002
Femtophonomagnetism — •Sangeeta Sharma1 and John Dewhurst1,2 — 1Max Born Institute, Berlin, Germany — 2Max Planck Inst. Halle, Germany
From the outset of research into femtomagnetism, the field in which spins are manipulated by light on femtosecond or faster time scales, several questions have arisen and remain highly debated: How does the light interact with spin moments? How is the angular momentum conserved between the nuclei, spin, and angular momentum during this interaction? What causes the ultrafast optical switching of magnetic structures? What is the ultimate time limit on the speed of spin manipulation? What is the impact of nuclear dynamics on the light-spin interaction?
In my talk I will advocate a parameter free ab-initio approach to treating ultrafast light-matter interactions, and discuss how this approach has led both to new answers to these old questions but also to the uncovering of novel and hitherto unsuspected early time spin dynamics phenomena [1, 2]. In particular I will show that phonons strongly influence the spin dynamics[3], demonstrating nuclear system can play a profound role in controlling femtosecond magnetization of materials.
[1] Dewhust et al., Nano Lett. 18, 1842 (2018).
[2] Siegrist et al. Nature 571, 240 (2019)
[3] Sharma et al. Sci. Advs. 8, eabq2021 (2022)
Keywords: spin-phonon coupling; femto-magnetism; electron phonon non-adiabatic mechanism; ultrafast