Abstract
Coherent light-matter interactions mediated by opto-magnetic phenomena like the inverse Faraday effect (IFE) are expected to provide a non-thermal pathway for ultrafast manipulation of magnetism on timescales as short as the excitation pulse itself. As the IFE scales with the spin-orbit coupling strength of the involved electronic states, photo-exciting the strongly spin-orbit coupled core-level electrons in magnetic materials appears as an appealing method to transiently generate large opto-magnetic moments. Here, we investigate this scenario in a ferrimagnetic GdFeCo alloy by using intense and circularly polarized pulses of extreme ultraviolet radiation. Our results reveal ultrafast and strong helicity-dependent magnetic effects which are in line with the characteristic fingerprints of an IFE, corroborated by ab initio opto-magnetic IFE theory and atomistic spin dynamics simulations.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 191 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| Journal | Communications Physics |
| Volume | 7 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 14 Jun 2024 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:I.R. acknowledges funding from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) through project 05K16BCA (Femto-THz-X) and the European Research Council through project TERAMAG (Grant No. 681917). C.v.K.S., P.M.O. and S.E. would like to thank the German Research Foundation (DFG) for funding through CRC/TRR 227 projects A02\u00A0and MF (project ID 328545488). S.R. gratefully acknowledges the support of ARCHER UK National Supercomputing Service via the project e733. S.R. and T.O. gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the EPSRC TERASWITCH project (project ID EP/T027916/1).\u00A0L.S. and P.M.O. acknowledge support by the Swedish Research Council (VR), the K. and A. Wallenberg Foundation (Grants No. 2022.0079 and 2023.0336), and the European Union\u2019s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under FET-OPEN Grant Agreement No. 863155 (s-Nebula). Part of the calculations were provided by the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC), funded by VR through grant No. 2018-05973. The authors acknowledge Elettra Sincrotrone Trieste for providing access to its free-electron laser facilities and thank all members of the different departments at FERMI for their outstanding assistance during the preparation and realization of the experiment. The authors also thank the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin f\u00FCr Materialien und Energie for the allocation of synchrotron-radiation beamtime.
Funding Information:
I.R. acknowledges funding from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) through project 05K16BCA (Femto-THz-X) and the European Research Council through project TERAMAG (Grant No. 681917). C.v.K.S., P.M.O. and S.E. would like to thank the German Research Foundation (DFG) for funding through CRC/TRR 227 projects A02 and MF (project ID 328545488). S.R. gratefully acknowledges the support of ARCHER UK National Supercomputing Service via the project e733. S.R. and T.O. gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the EPSRC TERASWITCH project (project ID EP/T027916/1). L.S. and P.M.O. acknowledge support by the Swedish Research Council (VR), the K. and A. Wallenberg Foundation (Grants No. 2022.0079 and 2023.0336), and the European Union\u2019s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under FET-OPEN Grant Agreement No. 863155 (s-Nebula). Part of the calculations were provided by the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC), funded by VR through grant No. 2018-05973. The authors acknowledge Elettra Sincrotrone Trieste for providing access to its free-electron laser facilities and thank all members of the different departments at FERMI for their outstanding assistance during the preparation and realization of the experiment. The authors also thank the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin f\u00FCr Materialien und Energie for the allocation of synchrotron-radiation beamtime.
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2024.