1. Ultrafast Opto-magnetic Effects in the Extreme Ultraviolet Spectral Range
- Author
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Hennecke, Martin, Schmising, Clemens von Korff, Yao, Kelvin, Jal, Emmanuelle, Vodungbo, Boris, Chardonnet, Valentin, Légaré, Katherine, Capotondi, Flavio, Naumenko, Denys, Pedersoli, Emanuele, Lopez-Quintas, Ignacio, Nikolov, Ivaylo P., Raimondi, Lorenzo, De Ninno, Giovanni, Salemi, Leandro, Ruta, Sergiu, Chantrell, Roy, Ostler, Thomas, Pfau, Bastian, Engel, Dieter, Oppeneer, Peter M., Eisebitt, Stefan, and Radu, Ilie
- Subjects
Condensed Matter - Materials Science - Abstract
Coherent light-matter interactions mediated by opto-magnetic phenomena like the inverse Faraday effect (IFE) are expected to provide a non-thermal pathway for ultrafast manipulation of magnetism on timescales as short as the excitation pulse itself. As the IFE scales with the spin-orbit coupling strength of the involved electronic states, photo-exciting the strongly spin-orbit coupled core-level electrons in magnetic materials appears as an appealing method to transiently generate large opto-magnetic moments. Here, we investigate this scenario in a ferrimagnetic GdFeCo alloy by using intense and circularly polarized pulses of extreme ultraviolet radiation. Our results reveal ultrafast and strong helicity-dependent magnetic effects which are in line with the characteristic fingerprints of an IFE, corroborated by ab initio opto-magnetic IFE theory and atomistic spin dynamics simulations.
- Published
- 2023
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