Ultrafast Dynamics of Orbital Angular Momentum of Electrons Induced by Femtosecond Laser Pulses: Generation and Transfer Across Interfaces
arXiv:2306.12810 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.108.104408
Abstract
The orbital angular momenta (OAM) of electrons play an increasingly important role in ultrafast electron and magnetization dynamics. In this theoretical study, we investigate the electron dynamics induced by femtosecond laser pulses in a normal metal, a ferromagnet, and a ferromagnet/normal metal heterostructure. We analyze the spatio-temporal distributions of the laser-induced OAM and their respective currents. Our findings demonstrate that a circularly polarized laser pulse can induce a sizable and long-lasting OAM component in a normal metal. Furthermore, an interface between a ferromagnet and a normal metal facilitates the demagnetization of the magnet by the OAM contribution to the total magnetization. Finally, to transfer OAM from a ferromagnet into a normal metal, it is advantageous to use a laser setup that induces the desired OAM component in the ferromagnet, but not in the normal metal.
References in corpus (15)
- Intrinsic Spin and Orbital Hall Effects from Orbital Texture
- Ultrafast transport of laser-excited spin polarized carriers in Au/Fe/MgO(001)
- Orbitronics: the Intrinsic Orbital Hall Effect in p-Doped Silicon
- Orbitronics: Orbital Currents in Solids
- Orbital Torque: Torque Generation by Orbital Current Injection
- Magneto-Optical Detection of the Spin Hall Effect in Pt and W Thin Films
- Time-domain observation of ballistic orbital-angular-momentum currents with giant relaxation length in tungsten
- Femtosecond spin current pulses generated by the non-thermal spin-dependent Seebeck effect and interacting with ferromagnets in spin valves
- Competing spin transfer and dissipation at Co/Cu(001) interfaces on femtosecond timescales
- Femtosecond x-ray absorption spectroscopy of spin and orbital angular momentum in photoexcited Ni films during ultrafast demagnetization
- Spin-Hall effect: Back to the Beginning on a Higher Level
- Attosecond magnetization dynamics in non-magnetic materials driven by intense femtosecond lasers
- X-ray imaging of spin currents and magnetisation dynamics at the nanoscale
- Ultrafast spin dynamics in inhomogeneous systems: a density-matrix approach applied to Co/Cu interfaces
- Ultrafast spin dynamics: complementing theoretical analyses by quantum-information measures
Cited by in corpus (6)
- Ultrafast Orbital Hall Effect in Metallic Nanoribbons
- Controlling the orbital Hall effect in gapped bilayer graphene in the terahertz regime
- Ultrafast chiral precession of spin and orbital angular momentum induced by circularly polarized laser pulse
- Scattering makes a difference in circular dichroic angle-resolved photoemission
- Surface photoelectric effect by twisted photons as a source of twisted electrons
- Nonlinear spin and orbital Rashba-Edelstein effects induced by a femtosecond laser pulse: Simulations for Au(001)