True amplification of spin waves in magnonic nano-waveguides

Authors: Merbouche H., Divinskiy B., Gouéré D., Lebrun R., El-Kanj A., Cros V., Bortolotti P., Anane A., Demokritov S. O., E. Demidov V.

Magnonic nano-devices exploit magnons — quanta of spin waves — to transmit and process information within a single integrated platform that has the potential to outperform traditional semiconductor-based electronics for low power applications. The main missing cornerstone of this information nanotechnology is an efficient scheme for the direct amplification of propagating spin waves. The recent discovery of spin-orbit torque provided an elegant mechanism for propagation losses compensation. While partial compensation of the spin-wave damping has allowed for spin-wave signal modulation, true amplification – the exponential increase in the spin-wave intensity during propagation – has so far remained elusive. Here we evidence the operating conditions to achieve unambiguous amplification using clocked nanoseconds -long spin-orbit torque pulses in sub-micrometer wide magnonic waveguides, where the effective magnetization has been engineered to be close to zero to suppress the detrimental magnon-magnon scattering. As a result, we achieve an exponential increase in the intensity of propagating spin waves up to 500 % at a propagation distance of several micrometers. These results pave the way towards the implementation of energy efficient, cascadable magnonic architectures for wave-based information processing and complex on-chip computation.