Jonathan Ehrler, Miao He, Maxim V Shugaev, Nikolay I Polushkin, Sebastian Wintz, Vico Liersch, Steffen Cornelius, René Hübner, Kay Potzger, Jürgen Lindner, Jürgen Fassbender, Ahmet A Ünal, Sergio Valencia, Florian Kronast, Leonid V Zhigilei, Rantej Bali
Manipulation of magnetism using laser light is considered as a key to the advancement of data storage technologies. Until now, most approaches seek to optically switch the direction of magnetization rather than to reversibly manipulate the ferromagnetism itself. Here, we use ∼100 fs laser pulses to reversibly switch ferromagnetic ordering on and off by exploiting a chemical order-disorder phase transition in Fe60 Al40 , from the B2 to the A2 structure and vice versa. A single laser pulse above a threshold fluence causes nonferromagnetic B2 Fe60 Al40 to disorder and form the ferromagnetic A2 structure...
April 17, 2018: ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces