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We investigate the effect of a direct current on propagating spin waves in a CoFeB/Ta bilayer structure. Using the micro-Brillouin light scattering technique, we observe that the spin wave damping and amplitude may be attenuated or amplified depending on the direction of the current and the applied magnetic field. Our work suggests an effective approach for electrically controlling the propagation of spin waves in a magnetic waveguide and may be useful in a number of applications such as phase locked nano-oscillators and hybrid information processing devices.

We demonstrate the use of the micro-Brillouin light scattering (micro-BLS) technique as a local temperature sensor for magnons in a Permalloy (Py) thin film and phonons in the glass substrate.When the Py film is uniformly heated, we observe a systematic shift in the frequencies of two thermally excited perpendicular standing spin wave modes. Fitting the temperature dependent magnon spectra allows us to achieve a temperature resolution better than 2.5 K. In addition, we demonstrate that the micro-BLS spectra can be used to measure the local temperature of magnons and the relative temperature shift of phonons across a thermal gradient. Such local temperature sensors are useful for investigating spin caloritronic and thermal transport phenomena in general.

We have experimentally studied the diffraction of spin waves propagating in a Permalloy-film microwaveguide from a submicrometer-sized circular defect. For microwave excitation above the cutoff frequency of the fundamental transverse mode, the defect leads to a frequency dependent reflection of the spin wave. The efficiency of the reflection appears to be dependent on the wavelength of the incident spin wave in a nonmonotonous way. The observed two-dimensional spin wave distribution pattern after the defect can be understood based on the interference of several copropagating modes, suggesting that the defect couples the fundamental mode with higher order modes.