Excitation of coherent propagating spin waves in ultrathin CoFeB film by voltage-controlled magnetic anisotropy

Spin waves (SWs) may be used as potential information carriers in next generation low-power spintronics devices. Here, we report an experimental study on the excitation of propagating magnetostatic surface SWs by voltage-controlled magnetic anisotropy in a 2 nm thick CoFeB film. The SWs are detected by a pico-second time-resolved longitudinal Kerr microscope with a spatial resolution of 600 nm. We found a linear increase in the SW amplitude with the applied rf voltage. We show that in this ultrathin film, the voltage excited SWs can propagate up to micrometer distances which decrease with the increase in the bias magnetic field value. This is also supported by micromagnetic simulation results. Furthermore, we show that voltage excitations are spatially localized as opposed to conventional microstrip antenna induced Oersted field excitations. We discuss about the advantage of voltage excitation compared to the Oersted field excitation. We believe that voltage excitation of SWs will be more suitable and useful for the development of all-voltage-controlled nanoscale spintronics devices with a high density of integration. (C) 2017 Author(s).