Magnonic Straintronics: Strain Engineering of Magnonic Hybrid Systems

Nontechnical description: Magnons can be understood as magnetic waves that propagate through magnetic materials. They can carry information without certain limitations of other technologies, which may help future devices use less energy than today’s electronics. This project will study how controlled strain or intentional stretching, compressing, and bending in the material can guide and control these magnetic waves. The research will also examine how magnetic waves interact with sound waves inside magnetic solids. This knowledge could lead to new ways of integrating magnetic, mechanical, and electronic functions in small devices. The project will train undergraduate and graduate students in materials research, device fabrication, measurements, and data analysis. The research team will also create hands-on outreach activities using three-dimensional printed structures to explain strain and its effects on materials to students, teachers, children, and families. Technical description: This project will establish the foundations of magnonic straintronics, an approach that uses strain to control magnons and their interactions with crystal-lattice vibrations. The central scientific problem is that the effects of static and dynamic strain on magnon generation, propagation, dispersion, coherence, and magnon-phonon coupling remain poorly understood in emerging magnetic material platforms. The research team will study both van der Waals ferromagnets and conventional ferromagnetic thin films placed on engineered substrates that impose permanent strain. The project will design and fabricate patterned substrates that create uniform and nonuniform strain landscapes, including periodic strain patterns that function as magnonic crystals. Microwave antennas will excite coherent spin waves, and spatially resolved measurements will determine how strain modifies spin-wave propagation, interference, and robustness against external disturbances. The research team will also use piezoelectric substrates to launch surface acoustic waves and examine how these waves excite magnons, how magnons excite phonons, and how the two types of waves form coupled hybrid modes. By comparing different magnetic layers, substrate designs, and strain profiles, the project will identify design rules for controlling magnetic and magnonic properties through strain. The results will provide new knowledge relevant to electronic and photonic materials, hybrid magnon-phonon systems, strain-engineered magnetic devices, and future low-power computing concepts such as spin-wave logic and neuromorphic information processing. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria. NSF Award ID: 2605500 | Program: 01002627DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT | Principal Investigator: Xi Wang | Institution: University of Delaware, NEWARK, DE | Award Amount: $600,024 View on NSF Award Search: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award/?AWD_ID=2605500 View on Research.gov: https://www.research.gov/awardapi-service/v1/awards/2605500.html