Spin oscillations in antiferromagnetic NiO triggered by circularly polarized light.
Coherent spin oscillations were nonthermally induced by circularly polarized pulses in the fully compensated antiferromagnet NiO. This effect is attributed to the action of the effective magnetic field generated by an inverse Faraday effect on the spins. The novelty of this mechanism is that spin oscillations are driven by the time derivative of the effective magnetic field which acts even on "pure" antiferromagnets with zero net magnetic moment in the ground state. The measured frequencies (1.07 THz and 140 GHz) correspond to the out-of-plane and in-plane modes of antiferromagnetic spin oscillations.
Satoh
Takuya
T
Institute of Industrial Science, University of Tokyo, Tokyo 153-8505, Japan.
Cho
Sung-Jin
SJ
Iida
Ryugo
R
Shimura
Tsutomu
T
Kuroda
Kazuo
K
Ueda
Hiroaki
H
Ueda
Yutaka
Y
Ivanov
B A
BA
Nori
Franco
F
Fiebig
Manfred
M