Magnon-phonon coupling of synthetic antiferromagnets in a surface acoustic wave cavity resonator

Abstract

We use a surface acoustic wave (SAW) cavity resonator to study the coupling of acoustic magnons in a synthetic antiferromagnet (SAF) and the phonons carried by SAWs. The SAF is composed of a CoFeB/Ru/CoFeB trilayer and the scattering matrix of the SAW resonator is studied to assess the coupling. We find that the spectral linewidth of the SAW resonator is modulated when the frequency of the excited magnons approaches the SAW resonance frequency. Moreover, the linewidth modulation varies with the magnitude and orientation of the external magnetic field. Such change in the spectral linewidth can be well reproduced using macrospin-like model calculations. From the model analyses, we estimate the magnon-phonon coupling strength to be $\sim$15.6 MHz at a SAW resonance frequency of 1.8 GHz: the corresponding magnomechanical cooperativity is $\sim$0.66. As the spectral shape hardly changes in a CoFeB single layer reference sample under the same experimental condition, these results show that SAF provides an ideal platform to study magnon-phonon coupling in a SAW cavity resonator.