Intrinsic damping effects in magnon spintronics
Name of applicant
Thorbjørn Skovhus
Title
Postdoctoral Fellow
Institution
Uppsala University
Amount
DKK 614,319
Year
2024
Type of grant
Internationalisation Fellowships
What?
Similar to water waves at sea, magnetic waves in materials are damped over time and require energy to sustain. The project focuses on the primary source of magnetic wave damping: Landau damping. Starting from the full theory of quantum mechanics, we will develop physical models and computational tools to account for magnetic wave damping in simulations of electronic devices.
Why?
The idea of magnon spintronics is to use magnetic waves instead of currents to transfer digital bits on a computer. Doing so can lead to computers of unprecedented speed and energy efficiency. In order to make this possible, we need new computational tools that can simulate magnetic wave damping and make sure that the waves live long enough to be reliable carriers of information.
How?
The starting point of the project is a set of approximations to the behavior of magnets in weak magnetic fields, lying at the basis of all current device modeling. By dropping some of these approximations, we will show how to capture Landau damping in simplified atomic models of magnetism, how to calculate material-specific damping constants and how to simulate magnetic wave lifetimes in devices.