Ultra-fast heat as sufficient stimulus for magnetisation reversal in a ferrimagnet
doi:10.1038/ncomms 1666 (2012)
The question of how and how fast magnetization can be reversed is a topic of great practical interest for the manipulation and storage of magnetic information. It is generally accepted that magnetization reversal should be driven by a stimulus represented by time non-invariant vectors such as a magnetic field, spin polarized electric current, or cross-product of two oscillating electric fields. However, until now it has been generally assumed that heating alone, not represented as a vector at all, cannot result in a deterministic reversal of magnetization, although it may assist this process. In our recent article we show numerically and demonstrate experimentally a novel mechanism of deterministic magnetization reversal in a ferrimagnet driven by an ultrafast heating of the medium resulting from the absorption of a sub-picosecond, laser pulse without the presence of a magnetic field.
For more details, see our recent article