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PRL 108, 257207 (2012) PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS 22 JUNE 2012

Storage-Recovery Phenomenon in Magnonic Crystal

A. V. Chumak,1,* V. I. Vasyuchka,1 A. A. Serga,1 M. P. Kostylev,2 V. S. Tiberkevich,3 and B. Hillebrands1
1
Fachbereich Physik and Forschungszentrum OPTIMAS, Technische Universität Kaiserslautern, 67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany
2
School of Physics, University of Western Australia, Crawley, Western Australia 6009, Australia
3
Department of Physics, Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan 48309, USA
(Received 5 July 2011; revised manuscript received 19 March 2012; published 20 June 2012)
The phenomenon of coherent wave trapping and restoration is demonstrated experimentally in a
magnonic crystal. Unlike the conventional scheme used in photonics, the trapping occurs not due to the
deceleration of the incident wave when it enters the periodic structure but due to excitation of the
quasinormal modes of the artificial crystal. This excitation occurs at the group velocity minima of
the decelerated wave in narrow frequency regions near the edges of the band gaps of the crystal. The
restoration of the traveling wave is implemented by means of phase-sensitive parametric amplification
of the stored mode.

DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.108.257207 PACS numbers: 75.30.Ds, 42.70.Ln, 42.70.Qs, 76.50.+g

The deceleration or even the full stop of light due to the
modification of the light dispersion in photonic crystals
(PCs) has been a topic of intense experimental and theo-
retical studies over the last decade [1–4]. A wave of light
propagating through a PC couples with the internal stand-
ing PC mode and generates a slow light mode. In terms of
the dispersion characteristics, this means that the slope of
the dispersion curve decreases at the edges of the band gaps
which results in an extremely small value of the group
velocity. It has been demonstrated that the slow light can be
used for time-domain processing, including buffering
(storage and recovery) of optical signals, as well as for
an enhancement of nonlinear effects due to the spatial
compression of optical energy [3,4].
Magnonic crystals (MCs) are the magnetic counterpart
of photonic crystals which operate with spin waves, i.e., the
collective oscillations of the spin lattice of a magnetic
material [5–13]. A wide range of parameters, which deter-
mine the spin-wave characteristics, can be periodically
modulated to form the MC. This and the possibility of
fast dynamic control of these parameters [14,15] make
MCs promising candidates for the fundamental studies as
well as for the transfer and processing of information in the
GHz frequency range. However, in spite of the consider-
able recent progress in MCs studies, neither spin-wave
deceleration nor storage-recovery of a spin-wave-carried
signal has been demonstrated yet. This may be due to
significant intrinsic spin-wave damping, which limits the
maximum number of structure periods to 20 or so (see
Ref. [16] and references therein). The small number of
periods implies that the slope of MC dispersion does not
become zero at the edges of the magnonic band gap in
contrast to the light dispersion at the edges of photonic
gaps. Hence, rather than vanishing, the group velocity of
spin waves only slightly decreases at the gap edges. This
makes the realization of storing a signal in a MC using the
slow spin-wave mode questionable.
As an alternative solution, in this Letter we show that the
storage-recovery phenomenon can be successfully realized
in an artificial crystal with a limited number of periods by
the use of a quasinormal mode (QNM) of this structure.
This mode is excited by the incident spin wave and con-
serves oscillation energy for a long time after the propagat-
ing wave has left the MC area. Upon subsequent
parametric amplification, the internal mode irradiates part
of its energy back into the propagating spin wave allowing
the coherent restoration of the stored signal. The restora-
tion occurs near the edges of the MC band gaps in narrow
(1.2 MHz) frequency windows around QNM eigen-
frequencies, which coincide with the local minima of the
spin-wave group velocity.
The magnonic crystal used in our experiment had been
produced in the form of a stripe of a low-damping magnetic
insulator (5:1
m-thick yttrium iron garnet (YIG) film)
with an array of parallel grooves chemically etched into
its surface [see Fig. 1(a)] [7]. The array comprises ten
300 nm-deep and 30
m-wide grooves placed 270
m
apart (lattice constant 300
m). The bias magnetic field
is applied along the stripe in order to form conditions for
propagation of backward volume magnetostatic spin waves
(BVMSWs) [16]. This type of spin wave was previously
found to be an excellent signal carrier for one-dimensional
MCs [7,17]. The waves were excited and detected in the
YIG film waveguide using microwave stripline antennas
placed at equal distances from both ends of the grooved
area and 8 mm apart from each other [Fig. 1(a)].
Microwave power of 0.3 mW applied to the input antenna
was sufficiently low to avoid nonlinear effects which could
potentially influence the input spin wave and storage pro-
cess. The measured transmission characteristic for the MC
along with the one for the reference unstructured YIG
waveguide are shown in the Fig. 1(b). Several band gaps
where spin waves are not able to propagate are clearly
visible.

0031-9007=12=108(25)=257207(5) 257207-1 Ó 2012 American Physical Society


PRL 108, 257207 (2012) PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS
FIG. 1 (color online). (a) Sketch of the experimental setup.
The MC is fabricated in the form of YIG spin-wave waveguide
with 10 grooves on its surface. The rf pump magnetic field is
parallel to the bias field H. (b) Measured transmission character-
istics (the ratio of the output signal intensity to the input) of the
plane YIG film and MC for the magnetic field H ¼ 1800 Oe.
Several band gaps are seen.
The amplification of the signals stored in the magnonic
crystal was realized by means of pulsed parallel electro-
magnetic pumping. Quantum-mechanically, such a pump-
ing represents a three-particle process [18,19], in which
one photon of the pumping electromagnetic field splits into
two magnons having half the pumping frequency and
opposite wave vectors. This phenomenon has been previ-
ously used for spin-wave amplification, wave-front rever-
sal, and for the recovery of a microwave signal stored as a
thickness spin-wave mode of a ferromagnetic film (see
review [16]). In our experiment, a pumping microwave
magnetic field was concentrated in the grooved area of
the YIG stripe by a dielectric resonator [20] having a
resonance frequency of 14.424 GHz.
The storage-recovery experiment was performed in the
following way. A 100 ns-long microwave pulse of fs ¼
7:212 GHz frequency is applied to the input antenna in
order to excite a traveling spin-wave packet which prop-
agates toward the output antenna. The time traces of the
output signal are shown in Fig. 2(a). First, the output
antenna receives a practically rectangular pulse without
any delay, caused by a direct electromagnetic leakage
from the input antenna at the time t ¼ 0. Approximately
0:3
s afterwards, a pulsed signal carried by spin waves
arrives at the output antenna. Well after this took place we
apply a 10
s-long pumping pulse at the frequency of
fp ¼ 2fs ¼ 14:424 GHz [21]. This resulted in the appear-
ance of an additional bell-shaped pulse at the output
antenna. This is the restored signal.
The restoration mechanism used in our experiments is
the same as previously used to recover the signals stored in
standing thickness spin-wave modes in plane magnetic
films [22]. It is based on frequency-selective parametric
amplification of a stored wave or oscillation. In a frequency
degenerated multimode system, the coherent stored mode
is amplified simultaneously with thermally driven spin
waves. The competition between these modes and the
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FIG. 2 (color online). (a) The normalized time profiles of the
restored signal measured at field H ¼ 1860 Oe for different
pumping powers: Pp1 ¼ 50 mW, Pp2 ¼ 90 mW, Pp3 ¼
320 mW. (b) Measured and calculated dependencies of the
restored signal power and recovery time as a function of the
pumping power.
consequent process of saturation of the parametric ampli-
fication are responsible for the restored pulse character-
istics. A qualitative analytical theory of the restoration
process of this type is given in [23], while a quantitative
theory is presented in [24,25].
The measured and calculated dependencies of the re-
stored signal power PR and of the recovery time tR on the
pumping power Pp are shown in Fig. 2(b). These data have
been obtained for a delay between the applications of the
input signal and the pump pulse of 0:5
s (no qualitative
difference was observed when this delay time was varied
between 0:4
s and 1:4
s). The calculation has been
performed using the analytical formulas from Ref. [23]
for the same parameters (the full lifetime of the stored
mode is 230 ns, of the thermal mode 270 ns, and the
difference between the thermal amplitude level AT and
the critical level of amplification saturation Acr is
lnðAcr =AT Þ ¼ 10:25). It can be seen that the measured
and calculated recovery time tR decreases and the restored
signal power PR increases with an increase in Pp . The
reason for this behavior is that an increase in pumping
power results in a stronger parametric amplification but
also leads to a faster saturation. The excellent agreement
between the theoretical prediction and the experiment
gives a solid support to our understanding of the nature
of the restoration process in a magnonic crystal.
Completely new and specific to the magnonic crystal is
the fact that the MC mode, which is used in the experiment
for the signal storage, consists of two counterpropagating

PRL 108, 257207 (2012) PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS
FIG. 3. Dependence of the restored signal power on the input
signal phase. The signal and pump generators were locked in.
waves with strictly coupled phases. The phase of the wave
propagating toward the output antenna ’k is determined by
the phase of an applied microwave signal ’s . The phase of
the counterpropagating wave ’
k is also ’s and is due to
the reflection inside of the Bragg lattice [26]. Importantly,
the parallel pumping, as a parametric process, also couples
two counterpropagating waves. The sum of their phases is
defined by the phase of the pump ’p : ’k þ ’
k ¼ ’p þ
=2 [18,19]. Thus, the restoration process in a MC com-
bines two different mechanisms of coupling of two coun-
terpropagating waves, and the phase conditions for both
mechanisms should be met simultaneously. As a result, the
characteristics of the restored pulse should be influenced
by the phase shift between the signal wave and the
pumping.
Indeed, we have experimentally registered the strong
dependence of the restored power (more than 15 dB) on
the input signal phase [27] (see Fig. 3). The maxima and
minima of the restored signal power PR correspond to the
input signal phase ’smax ¼ ’p =2 þ =4 þ 2n and
’smin ¼ ’p =2
=4 þ 2n, respectively (where n is an
integer value). As a result, the phase distance between
neighboring minima and maxima is exactly 90. The ob-
served phase dependence clearly demonstrates that the sig-
nal stored inside the MC is phase correlated to the input
microwave signal: in spite of the distortion of the time
profile of the original pulse, its phase information is con-
served. Furthermore, these results evidence the fact that a
standing mode of a magnonic crystal consisting of the two
waves of opposite wave vectors participates in the storage-
recovery process.
In order to understand the nature of this mode, we have
compared the spectral characteristics of the magnonic
crystal with the corresponding dependence of the restora-
tion efficiency. The power of the transmitted spin-wave
signal, the spin-wave group velocity vgr , and the power of
the restored signal PR are shown in Fig. 4 as a function of
the applied magnetic field. As the experiment has been
performed for the fixed signal frequency fs , the variation in
the bias field in this case results in the variation of the spin-
wave wave number. Therefore, Fig. 4(a) is practically a
mirror image of Fig. 1(b). We used the transfer matrix
257207-3
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FIG. 4 (color online). (a) Transmission of the spin-wave signal
as a function of bias magnetic field (open circles for experiment,
line for theory). (b) Dependence of the group velocity vgr on the
field H. The slight decrease in vgr at the edges of the band gap is
visible. (c) Measured restored signal power PR as a function of
field H. One sees that the restored signal is visible only at the
edges of the band gaps.
approach [7,17] to model the field dependence of the
spin-wave transmission through the magnonic crystal. As
seen in Fig. 4(a), the simulated characteristics are in good
agreement with the experiment (parameters for the simu-
lations were taken from [7]).
We also calculated the group velocity vgr and compared
it with the experimental data [28]. From Fig. 4(b) one
clearly sees that both the measured and the calculated
group velocities decrease at the edges of the band gaps
where the slope of spin-wave dispersion decreases. This
decrease is 20% at most (for the first band gap where the
restored signal is maximal) and cannot be used in a
slowing-down approach to store information for a reason-
ably long time as in the case of photonic crystals [4].
However, as one can see from Fig. 4(c), the maxima of
the restored pulse correlate well with the minima of the
group velocity [29]. The field width of the regions where
the restoration takes place [see inset in Fig. 4(c)] is very
narrow (approximately 0.4 Oe) and is comparable with the
ferromagnetic resonance linewidth (0.5 Oe in our case).
The appearance of the restored pulse at the band gap
edges can be understood in the frame of the proposed
model which assumes that the storage of the spin-wave
signal is based on quasinormal modes [30] of the magnonic
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PRL 108, 257207 (2012) PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS 22 JUNE 2012

10 2 20
crystal. Any artificial crystal of finite length L presents an

- a)Tgr
(a) (b)

/ Tgr
open system which is coupled to the outside medium. n=1 15 n =4
10 1
n=2 3

n
Respectively, internal excitations of such crystal can be n=3
n=

Lifetime
excited from outside (in contrast to normal modes of a 10
n=2

closed system) and, in turn, lose their energy by radiating
traveling waves. Mathematically, the time-evolution opera-
tor of this system is not Hermitian anymore, and, conse-
quently, the eigenfunctions are not normal modes but
quasinormal modes (QNMs) whose frequencies are com-
plex, ! ¼ !0 þ i!00 . The lifetime of a QNM is equal to the
inverse of the imaginary part of the frequency,  ¼ 1=!00 ,
and it can be substantially larger than the corresponding
traveling time Tgr ¼ L=vgr in homogeneous medium.
Please note that  includes only the radiation losses, and
thus is longer than the full lifetime.
Moreover, we would like to emphasize the principal
difference between the traveling time Tgr and the lifetime
 for storage purposes. In the case of a traveling wave
packet, the storage time does not exceed the time Tgr at
which the spin-wave energy completely leaves the mag-
nonic crystal. On the contrary, in the case of quasinormal
mode, the time  characterizes its decay rate only. Since
this mode does not propagate, and thus remains perma-
nently in the magnonic crystal, its energy is stored until the
amplitude of this mode falls down to the level of thermal
fluctuations. Consequently, the storage time can signifi-
cantly exceed the lifetime .
The QNM eigenfrequencies can be found numerically as
complex eigenvalues of the crystal’s transfer matrix and
correspond to the local minima of the spin-wave group
velocity. In our magnonic crystal inside of each MC pass-
band, there are nine QNMs located symmetrically relative to
the centers of the MC band gaps !a [see Fig. 4(b)]. Both the
frequency and the lifetime of each of these modes strongly
depend on the spin-wave coupling with the groove structure,
which, in turn, is determined by the spin-wave reflectivity
from the single groove and can be characterized by the half-
width of the MC band gap
a . These dependencies are
presented in Fig. 5 for four modes from the first pass-band.
One can see that the life time is maximal for the mode which
is closest to the band gap edge (n ¼ 1). Furthermore, for our
experimental conditions the frequency of this mode coincides
with the global minima of vgr [see Fig. 5(b)]. Thus n¼1
QNM conserves energy for the longest time (n¼1 =Tgr ’ 5:3,
as Tgr ’110 ns and
a ¼ 2  10 MHz for the first band
gap in our experiment) and can interact with the parametric
pumping long after the exciting traveling spin wave packet
has passed. As a result, the restoration phenomenon is ob-
served only at the global minima of vgr . Furthermore, the
amplification of the MC mode is maximal for the mode with
the lowest damping [20], and thus with the longest lifetime.
This effect contributes additionally to the strong localization
of the restored signals at the band- gap edges.
In conclusion, we have experimentally demonstrated
that spin waves can be stored in a magnonic crystal.
Frequency
0
n=4
10 Group velocity
5
minimum
n=1
10 -1
0 5 10 15 20
0
0 5 10 15 20
Coupling strength aTgr Coupling strength aTgr
FIG. 5 (color online). Lifetime n (a) and frequency !n (b) of
the quasinormal MC modes in the first pass-band calculated for
n ¼ 1
4 as functions of the MC band gap half-width
a .
Frequencies in (b) are measured from the center of the band gap
!a . MC traveling time Tgr ¼ L=vgr , where L is the length of
MC, is used as a normalization factor. The group velocity
minimum frequency near the band gap edge is shown by a
dashed line. The dotted line in (a) indicates the experimental
conditions for the first band gap.
The storage is based on the excitation of the quasinormal
mode of the crystal rather than on the deceleration of the
propagating wave, which is only 20% at maximum in our
case. The first quasinormal mode, which eigenfrequency
coincide with the minima of spin-wave group velocity at
the edges of the MCs band gaps, has the longest lifetime
and, thus, conserves the signal energy and phase informa-
tion for a long time after the propagating wave has left the
MC. In order to restore the signal, the further parametric
amplification of this mode is used. The dependence of the
restored signal power on the phase of the input wave
evidences simultaneous amplification of two phase-
coupled waves of opposite wave vectors and, thus, corrob-
orates the role of the standing MC mode in the storage
mechanism. The results presented here provide deeper
understanding of the storage-recovery mechanisms in pe-
riodic lattices in general. Besides, they suggest a potential
possibility of utilization of magnonic crystals for buffering
or storage of microwave information.
We acknowledge financial support by Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft (SE 1771/1-2) and the
Australian Research Council and technical support from
the Nano-Structuring Center, TU Kaiserslautern. The au-
thors thank M. Fleischhauer for helpful discussions.
*chumak@physik.uni-kl.de
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