Ultrafast heating as a sufficient stimulus for magnetization reversal in a ferrimagnet.
The question of how, and how fast, magnetization can be reversed is a topic of great practical interest for the manipulation and storage of magnetic information. It is generally accepted that magnetization reversal should be driven by a stimulus represented by time-non-invariant vectors such as a magnetic field, spin-polarized electric current, or cross-product of two oscillating electric fields. However, until now it has been generally assumed that heating alone, not represented as a vector at all, cannot result in a deterministic reversal of magnetization, although it may assist this process. Here we show numerically and demonstrate experimentally a novel mechanism of deterministic magnetization reversal in a ferrimagnet driven by an ultrafast heating of the medium resulting from the absorption of a sub-picosecond laser pulse without the presence of a magnetic field.
Department of Physics, University of York, York YO10 5DD, UK. tao500@york.ac.uk
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Ostler
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Barker
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Evans
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Chantrell
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Atxitia
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Chubykalo-Fesenko
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El Moussaoui
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Le Guyader
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Mengotti
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Heyderman
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Nolting
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Tsukamoto
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Itoh
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Afanasiev
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Ivanov
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Kalashnikova
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Vahaplar
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Mentink
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Kirilyuk
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Rasing
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Kimel