Emission of fast-propagating spin waves by an antiferromagnetic domain wall driven by spin current

Abstract

Antiferromagnets (AFMs) have great benefits for spintronic applications such as high frequencies (up to THz), high speeds (up to tens of km/s) of magnetic excitations, and field-free operation. Advanced devices will require high-speed propagating spin waves (SWs) as signal carriers, i.e., SWs with high k vectors, the excitation of which remains challenging. We show that a domain wall (DW) in anisotropic AFM driven by the spin current can be a source of such propagating SWs with high frequencies and group velocities. In the proposed generator, the spin current, with polarization directed along the easy anisotropy axis, excites the precession of the Néel vector within the DW. The threshold current is defined by the value of the anisotropy in the hard plane, and the frequency of the DW precession is tunable by the strength of the spin current. We show that the above precession of spins inside the DW leads to robust emission of high-frequency propagating SWs into the AFM strip with very short wavelengths comparable to the exchange length, which is hard to achieve by any other method. Published by the American Physical Society 2024