Teaching an old equation new tricks - researchers open new avenues for the interaction of optical be

(Spintronics-info June 22nd) Researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel have made a recent discovery that could change the face of spintronics research. They discovered that the most important equation used to describe magnetization dynamics, namely the Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert (LLG) equation, also applies to the optical domain. Consequently, they found that the helicity-dependent optical control of the magnetization state emerges naturally from their calculations. This is a very surprising result since the LLG equation was considered to describe much slower dynamics and it was not expected to yield a meaningful outcome also at the optical limit.