Radiation- and Phonon-Bottleneck-Induced Tunneling in the Fe8 Single-Molecule Magnet

Abstract

We measure magnetization changes in a single crystal of the single-molecule magnet Fe8 when exposed to intense, short (<20 $\mu$s) pulses of microwave radiation resonant with the m = 10 to 9 transition. We find that radiation induces a phonon bottleneck in the system with a time scale of ~5 $\mu$s. The phonon bottleneck, in turn, drives the spin dynamics, allowing observation of thermally assisted resonant tunneling between spin states at the 100-ns time scale. Detailed numerical simulations quantitatively reproduce the data and yield a spin-phonon relaxation time of T1 ~ 40 ns.

6 RevTeX pages, including 4 EPS figures, version accepted for publication

References in corpus (7)

• Will spin-relaxation times in molecular magnets permit quantum information processing?
• Magnetization dynamics in the single-molecule magnet Fe8 under pulsed microwave irradiation
• Pump-Probe Experiments on the Single-Molecule Magnet Fe8 : Measurement of Excited Level Lifetimes
• Towards Microscopic Understanding of the Phonon Bottleneck
• Giant isotope effect in the incoherent tunneling specific heat of the molecular nanomagnet Fe8
• Magnetization and EPR studies of the single molecule magnet Ni${}_4$ with integrated sensors
• Magneto-elastic waves in crystals of magnetic molecules

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• Are superparamagnetic spins classical?