Absorbing boundary layers for spin wave micromagnetics

Abstract

Micromagnetic simulations are used to investigate the effects of different absorbing boundary layers (ABLs) on spin waves (SWs) reflected from the edges of a magnetic nano-structure. We define the conditions that a suitable ABL must fulfill and compare the performance of abrupt, linear, polynomial and tan hyperbolic damping profiles in the ABL. We first consider normal incidence in a permalloy stripe and propose a transmission line model to quantify reflections and calculate the loss introduced into the stripe due to the ABL. We find that a parabolic damping profile absorbs the SW energy efficiently and has a low reflection coefficient, thus performing much better than the commonly used abrupt damping profile. We then investigated SWs that are obliquely incident at 26.6, 45 and 63.4 degrees on the edge of a yttrium-iron-garnet film. The parabolic damping profile again performs efficiently by showing a high SW energy transfer to the ABL and a low reflected SW amplitude.