Reconfigurable magnonic crystals: Spin wave propagation in Pt/Co multilayer in saturated and stripe domain phase

To control the spin wave (SW) propagation, external energy sources such as magnetic fields, electric currents, or complex nanopatterning are used, which can be challenging at the deep nanoscale level. In this work, we overcome such limitations by demonstrating SW propagation in Pt/Co multilayers at a remanent state controlled by stripe domain patterns, using Brillouin light scattering and micromagnetic simulations. We show that parallel stripes with a periodicity around 100 nm exhibit reconfigurability, as the stripes can be rotated by applying the in-plane field without damaging their shape. This allows us to study SW propagation perpendicular and parallel to the stripes. We observe multimodal SW spectra—three bands in perpendicular and five in parallel geometry. Numerical results allow us to identify all observed modes and to explain the differences between two configurations by the unequal contribution of all three magnetization components in the SW dynamics. We find that the experimentally measured non-reciprocal dispersion (for the wavevector perpendicular to the stripes) is not the breaking of time-symmetry but the asymmetry in intensity of the measured signals of two different low-frequency modes, which is due to the inhomogeneous SW amplitude distribution over the multilayer thickness and the limited light penetration depth. Our results pave the way for easy reprogrammability and high energy efficiency in nanomagnonics.