Overcoming damping in spin wave propagation: A continuous excitation approach to determine time-dependent dispersion diagrams in 2D magnonic crystals

Abstract: We propose an alternative micromagnetic approach to determine the spin wave dispersion relations in magnonic structures. Characteristic of the method is that a limited area of the system is continuously excited with a spatially uniform oscillating field, tuned at a given frequency. After a transitory time, the regime magnetization dynamics is collected and a spatial Fourier analysis on it determines the frequency vs wave vector relation. Combining several simulations in any predetermined range of frequencies, at any resolution, we investigate the dispersion relations for different kinds of magnonic crystals: a dot array, an antidot array, and a bicomponent film. Especially compared to traditional pulse-excitation methods this technique has many advantages. First, the excitation power is concentrated at a single frequency, allowing the corresponding spin waves to propagate with very low attenuation, resulting in a higher k-space resolution. Second, the model allows to include very large wave vector components, necessary to describe the high-frequency response of non-quantized spin waves in quasi-continuous systems. Finally, we address some possible experimental opportunities with respect to excitation/detection techniques over large distances and the observation of the odd/even symmetry of spin waves using Brillouin light scattering.