Parametric Excitation and Instabilities of Spin Waves driven by Surface Acoustic Waves

The parametric excitation of spin waves by coherent surface acoustic waves is demonstrated experimentally in metallic magnetic thin film structures. The involved magnon modes are analyzed with micro-focused Brillouin light scattering spectroscopy and complementary micromagnetic simulations combined with analytical modelling are used to determine the origin of the spin-wave instabilities. Depending on the experimental conditions, we observe spin-wave instabilities originating from different phonon-magnon and magnon-magnon scattering processes. Our results demonstrate that an efficient excitation of high amplitude, strongly nonlinear magnons in metallic ferromagnets is possible by surface acoustic waves, which opens novel ways to create micro-scaled nonlinear magnonic systems for logic and data processing that can profit from the high excitation efficiency of phonons using piezoelectricity.