Berlin 2015 – scientific programme

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MA: Fachverband Magnetismus

MA 41: Focus: All-optical magnetic switching

MA 41.3: Invited Talk

Thursday, March 19, 2015, 11:00–11:30, H 1012

All-optical switching: a challenge for its theoretical description — •Ulrich Nowak¹, Sönke Wienholdt¹, Steffen Sievering¹, Denise Hinzke¹, Karel Carva², and Peter Oppeneer² — ¹Fachbereich Physik, Universität Konstanz, D-78457 Konstanz — ²Department of Physics, Uppsala University, SE-751 20 Uppsala

The term all-optical switching (AOS) refers to the fact that some magnetic materials can be switched solely by the effect of an ultrafast laser pulse, without any applied magnetic field. First, this effect was shown for ferrimagnets [1-3] but later also for layered, synthetic ferrimagnets [4] and recently even for ferromagnets [6]. Two different kinds of AOS have to be distinguished, namely helicity dependent AOS [1,4,5], where the new magnetic orientation is defined by the helicity of the laser light, and thermally driven swiching with linearly polarized light which cannot define the new orientation but always switches the initial state to the reversed one. In this talk an overview over the current status of the understanding and the remaining open questions is given.

Supported by the EC under Contract No. 281043, FemtoSpin

[1] K. Vahaplar et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 117201 (2009) [2] I. Radu et al., Nature 472, 205 (2011) [3] S. Wienholdt et al., Phys. Rev. B, 88, 020406(R) (2013) [4] S. Mangin et al., Nature Mater. 13, 286 (2014) [5] C.-H. Lambert et al., Science 345, 1337 (2014)