Microwave excitation of spin wave beams in thin ferromagnetic films

An inherent element of research and applications in photonics is a beam of light. In magnonics, which is the magnetic counterpart of photonics, where spin waves are used instead of electromagnetic waves to transmit and process information, the lack of a beam source limits exploration. Here, we present an approach enabling generation of narrow spin wave beams in thin homogeneous nanosized ferromagnetic films by microwave current. We show that the desired beam-type behavior can be achieved with the aid of a properly designed coplanar waveguide transducer generating a nonuniform microwave magnetic field. We test this idea using micromagnetic simulations, confirming numerically that the resulting spin wave beams propagate over distances of several micrometers. The proposed approach requires neither inhomogeneity of the ferromagnetic film nor nonuniformity of the biasing magnetic field. It can be generalized to different magnetization configurations and yield multiple spin wave beams of different width at the same frequency.