Unfortunately, such nanoscale microwave oscillators suffer from very low power and high phase noise. It is generally accepted that one of the most attractive ways to solve this issue is to synchronise a large number of these nanoscopic oscillators in order to limit the detrimental influence of thermal energy.
PhD student Afshin Houshang and his supervisor Dr Randy Dumas have succeeded in demonstrating that it is possible to create and utilise focused beams of spin waves to synchronise oscillators over much larger distances than shown previously and robustly synchronise a record number of oscillators.
Houshang and Dumas claim to have synchronised five oscillators and demonstrated the resulting improvement in the oscillator quality.
Dumas said: “Because we now know how to control the spin wave propagation, there is really no limit to how many oscillators we can now synchronise.”
Since the direction of the spin wave beam can be tailored via electrical current through the oscillator and via an external magnetic field, the results will also have a major impact in the burgeoning field of spin wave based electronics. By changing the direction of the beam, one can choose which oscillators synchronise and thereby control the flow of information in magnonic circuits in a way that was not possible before.
The results also open up new opportunities for fundamental studies of networks of strongly nonlinear oscillators where an array of perhaps a hundred such oscillators in different geometric architectures can be externally controlled and studied in detail.
“We hope to use these and similar components for extremely fast neuromorphic calculations based on oscillator networks,” Dumas concluded.
