The first time you meet someone can be crucial. If that first time is in the fantastic conditions ensured by the Wolfgang Pauli Institute and its director and workshop co-organizer, Norbert Mauser, it will be most likely positive. Experts hailing from across Europe in the emerging field of inverse-desing magnonics were afforded the chance to partake in the spirit of academic freedom and emphasis on interdisciplinarity offered by the Viennese institution. Many of them met for the first time in person and from these intense days, new projects and ideas have emerged.

• What is inverse-design magnonics?
  Inverse-design magnonics, unlike traditional design methods that rely on trial-and-error or intuitive design principles, starts with a desired outcome or functionality and works backward to determine the material structures or configurations that can achieve those specific outcomes. This method employs computational algorithms, including optimization and machine learning techniques, to explore a vast design space and identify optimal structures that can control and manipulate spin waves in ways that meet predefined criteria. The aim is to achieve more efficient, tunable, and novel functionalities for applications in spintronics, information processing, and quantum computing technologies, among others.

Another co-organizer of the workshop was Dieter Suess, leader of the research group Physics of Functional Material at the University of Vienna, whose world-leading team in numerical simulations played a crucial role in many of the workshop’s contributions. The last co-organizer was Andrii Chumak, from our group Nanomagnetism and Magnonics. The participants came from institutions from Germany, Hungary, and Austria.

Many of the researchers participating in the workshop were young PhD students, who had the opportunity to present their studies and share their ideas with more senior researchers. The combination of expertises and career-levels focusing on one single topic made for a very productive, albeit intensive, workshop. This has given momentum to the field and the participants left Vienna forecasting a prosperous future for this research direction.

When asked about the workshop, Andrii Chumak responded “Well, it has been two very intense days, I feel as a week has passed! But it was so productive, that we are considering repeating this format regularly every two year.”