Scientific report

The focus of the International Seminar and Workshop "Magnonics: From Fundamentals to Applications" held in Dresden from August 2nd to 29th, 2009, was on the newly emerging field of magnonics as highlighted by the title. The field encompasses current research efforts aiming at magnetic materials whose properties are tailored on the nanoscale and where spin waves (magnons) carry and process information. The efforts address the investigation of fundamental properties as well as the creation of novel magnetic field controlled devices. Magnonics is currently gaining momentum, attracting more and more researchers from various subfields of magnetism and materials research, as well as microwave engineering. So, the conference was very well timed and in fact was the first international conference of its kind. During the seminar it was announced that a symposium on magnonics was being initiated in the framework of the APS March Meeting 2010.

The event was very successful, having achieved its main aim of forming a community of magnonics researchers. Researchers from 19 countries and with a total number of 86 were attending the event. The seminar and workshop brought together, both, experts who exhibited world-wide leading positions in nanomagnetism and magnon research as well as young researchers just entering the field. The presentations covered the whole spectrum from fundamental magnonic properties to their application in the information technologies. The main scientific result of the conference in the broader sense was the emergence of magnonics as a sister-field in the family of functional nano-materials, also including electronics, photonics, phononics, plasmonics etc.

The round table discussions held in the course of the seminar, both, provided a further impetus for the search for new concepts addressing the practical realisation of magnonic devices and helped to identify future challenges for magnonics. Of particular interest were talks of and discussions with such senior and well-known researchers as Professors Josef Barnas, Bob Camley, Gennadiy Melkov, Sergey Nikitov, Andrey Slavin, and Dan Stancil, who have contributed relevant works on magnon research since decades. The scientific "newcomers" to the field of magnonics, who are in some cases well established in related sub-fields of magnetism, presented excellent contributions. Bright talks were given by Andrii Chumak, Vladislav Demidov, and Alexey Kimel. The event was also very useful in terms of both establishing new collaborations and providing a forum for scientific discussions within existing ones. For example, in one case, a theoretical model successfully describing experimental data presented during the workshop was developed during the life time of the seminar!

The workshop has received a significant publicity, with several invitations to publish Proceedings and to prepare books received by its organisers and participants. After a careful consideration, it was decided to publish a cluster of review articles defining the scope of and the current state of the art in magnonics research in Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics (tentatively in April 2010). Finally, inspired by the success of the event, it was decided to continue this meeting by transforming it into a conference series, with the next one tentatively held in Recife (Brazil) in 2011.

For further information please e-mail to: magnon09@pks.mpg.de