Intense laser light can create attosecond magnetism in solids with heavy atoms, offering new insights into magnetization and potentially enabling ultrafast memory devices.
Intense laser light can induce magnetism in solids on the attosecond scale – the fastest magnetic response to date. That is the finding reached by theoreticians at the MPSD, who used advanced simulations to investigate the magnetization process in several 2D and 3D materials. Their calculations show that, in structures with heavy atoms, the fast electron dynamics initiated by the laser pulses can be converted to attosecond magnetism. The work has been published in the journal npj Computational Materials.
The team concentrated on several benchmark 2D and 3D material systems, but the results apply to all materials that include heavy atomic constituents. “The heavy atoms are especially important, because they induce a strong spin-orbit interaction,” explains lead author Ofer Neufeld. “This interaction is key to converting the light-induced electron motion into spin polarization – in other words, into magnetism. Otherwise, light simply doesn’t interact with the electrons’ spin.”
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