A message from Andrii

A message from Andrii

This year's report is special because our Nanomagnetism and Magnonics group celebrated its fifth birthday in September, a significant milestone. In general, the group is active and successful, with a real team spirit of young and enthusiastic researchers. Many scientific directions that we have been working on for years are successfully completed with the submitted articles. Many new proposals are submitted to realise new and even more challenging tasks and ideas.

The NanoMag is also changing as a research unit. A talented Assistant Professor Luca Felix Banszerus, a leading expert on quantum dots in low-dimensional systems, has joined our Faculty of Physics in December 2024 and his group has been assigned to the NanoMag unit. We are delighted to welcome Luca and wish him every success in Vienna! Bernd Aichner reinforced Luca's group as a postdoctoral researcher.

This year, Oleksandr Dobrovolskiy left his position as Senior Scientist at NanoMag for a professorship at TU Braunschweig. We wish him all the best in his new position. Many top researchers from around the world applied for the position and the new Senior Scientist will join the NanoMag very soon in early 2025.

We also had other good news on the personal front: our first PhD Student, Barbora Koraltan (née Bundinská), graduated this summer. Some time later, in November this year, Sebastian Lamb-Camarena also successfully defended his thesis. Clemens Schmid continues his doctoral studies under the remote supervision of Oleksandr. And a new PhD Student, Fabian Majcen, joined the group after completing his Master's degree in the NanoMag. I am also very glad to welcome Phillip Rehberger, Boris Valenta and Simon Peinhaupt as our new Master’s Students. The VDSP summer internship of Kaitlin McAllister from Dmytro Bozhko's group in Colorado Springs was amazing and super fruitful.

We are pleased to report significant scientific progress across multiple research directions within our group. Rostyslav Serha and David Schmoll successfully completed a series of studies on magnon transport in YIG/GGG systems at millikelvin temperatures. In parallel, numerical simulations of ferrimagnet/paramagnet bilayers pioneered by Andrey Voronov have provided deeper insight into the underlying physical processes. These results mark an important step for the field of quantum magnonics, enabling the transition from standing to propagating single magnons and opening new avenues for solid-state quantum physics. Sebastian Knauer and David Schmoll are currently finalizing the world’s first millikelvin BLS setup, utilizing magneto-optics to further advance our understanding of quantum magnonics. Khrystyna Levchenko is making excellent progress with her prestigious ESPRIT FWF fellowship on nanoscale magnonic crystals and has submitted a comprehensive review on spin-wave RF applications. Kristýna Davídková, a PhD student specialising in applied magnonics, has submitted her results on the first spin-wave RF frequency-selective limiter and is finalising the manuscript on the SW delay line.

The highlight of the year comes from Noura Zenbaa, who, after several years of dedicated work, has demonstrated the feasibility of performing inverse design magnonics directly in experiment without the use of numerical simulations. This breakthrough will soon be published in Nature Electronics. In a subsequent preprint, we have shown that this universal device, which we internally call an analogue computer, is capable of realising any logic gate including half-adder. Fabian Majcen will now explore the device's potential for neuromorphic and reservoir computing. At the same time, Andrey Voronov, under the co-supervision of Claas Abert from the Functional Materials Group, has shown how to overcome the fundamental limitations of the numerical inverse design concept in terms of memory.

Collaboration remains a cornerstone of our success. Working with esteemed colleagues such as Qi Wang, who now heads his own magnonics group in Wuhan, and maintaining strong partnerships with researchers such as Philipp Pirro from RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau and Michal Urbánek from CEITEC Brno, we are expanding the horizons of our research. For us, the theoretical support of Roman Verba from the Institute of Magnetism in Kyiv is vital. Valeriy Lozovskiy, who received friendly support from Erwin-Schrödinger Institute after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, has opened up a new line of research in plasmon-enhanced BLS.  As always, our ties with Dieter Suess' Functional Materials group are strong: we are pleased to announce the IMECS project, led by Florian Bruckener, with Dieter and me as co-PIs. The Viennese magnetism community has also gained a great colleague with our friend Amalio Fernández-Pacheco, who started his group at the TU Wien.

Beyond our scientific achievements, the camaraderie and enthusiasm within our group create an environment where innovation thrives. Our recent team-building hike in the hills of Vienna exemplifies the balance we strive for between rigorous research and fostering a supportive community.

I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to all colleagues and friends for their support and collaboration. Wishing everyone an inspiring and successful 2025!

Warm regards,
Andrii