Effect of magnetization pinning on the spectrum of spin waves in magnonic antidot waveguides

Abstract

We study the spin-wave spectra in magnonic antidot waveguides (MAWs) for two limiting cases (strong and negligible) of the surface anisotropy at the ferromagnet/air interface. The MAWs under investigation have the form of a thin stripe of permalloy with a single row of periodically arranged antidots in the middle. The introduction of a magnetization pinning at the edges of the permalloy stripe and the edges of antidots is found to modify the spin-wave spectrum. This effect is shown to be necessary for magnonic gaps to open in the considered systems. Our study demonstrates that the surface anisotropy can be crucial in the practical applications of MAWs and related structures and in the interpretation of experimental results in one- and two-dimensional magnonic crystals. We used three different numerical methods i.e. plane waves method (PWM), finite difference method and finite element method to validate the results. We showed that PWM in the present formulation assumes pinned magnetization while in micromagnetic simulations special care must be taken to introduce pinning.