Gia-Wei Chern

Corrugated long-period fiber gratings as strain, torsion, and bending sensors

We present a novel corrugated long-period fiber grating whose transmission spectra are highly sensitive to the applied tensile strain, torsion, and bending due to the periodical index modulation created and changed by these mechanic forces. The induced index modulation can also be experimentally characterized by using a built-in fiber Bragg grating (FBG). The long period fiber gratings possess the following unique properties when used as sensors. As a tensile strain sensor, its resonance loss varies but resonance wavelength remains stable. As a torsion sensor, the wavelength varies with the applied twist rate. As a bending sensor, the cladding-mode resonance grows with the bending curvature.

Magnetic bistability and controllable reversal of asymmetric ferromagnetic nanorings.

Magnetization reversals through the formation of a vortex state and the rotation of an onion state are two processes with comparable probabilities for symmetric magnetic nanorings with a radius of about 50 nanometers. This magnetic bistability is the manifestation of the competition between the exchange energy and the magnetostatic energy in nanomagnets. The relative probability of the two processes in symmetric nanorings is dictated by the ring geometry and cannot be altered after fabrication. In this work, we report a novel type of nanorings--asymmetric nanorings. By tuning the asymmetry, we can control the fraction of the vortex formation process from about 40% to nearly 100% by utilizing the direction of the external magnetic field. The observed results have been accounted for by the dependence of the domain-wall energy on the local cross-section area for which we have provided theoretical calculations.

Fractional vortices and composite domain walls in flat nanomagnets

We provide a simple explanation of complex magnetic patterns observed in ferromagnetic nanostructures. To this end we identify elementary topological defects in the field of magnetization: ordinary vortices in the bulk and vortices with half-integer winding numbers confined to the edge. Domain walls found in experiments and numerical simulations in strips and rings are composite objects containing two or more of the elementary defects.

Crystallites of magnetic charges in artificial spin ice

Artificial spin ice is a class of lithographically created arrays of interacting ferromagnetic nanometre-scale islands. It was introduced to investigate many-body phenomena related to frustration and disorder in a material that could be tailored to precise specifications and imaged directly. Because of the large magnetic energy scales of these nanoscale islands, it has so far been impossible to thermally anneal artificial spin ice into desired thermodynamic ensembles; nearly all studies of artificial spin ice have either treated it as a granular material activated by alternating fields or focused on the as-grown state of the arrays. This limitation has prevented experimental investigation of novel phases that can emerge from the nominal ground states of frustrated lattices. For example, artificial kagome spin ice, in which the islands are arranged on the edges of a hexagonal net, is predicted to support states with monopolar charge order at entropies below that of the previously observed pseudo-ice manifold. Here we demonstrate a method for thermalizing artificial spin ices with square and kagome lattices by heating above the Curie temperature of the constituent material. In this manner, artificial square spin ice achieves unprecedented thermal ordering of the moments. In artificial kagome spin ice, we observe incipient crystallization of the magnetic charges embedded in pseudo-ice, with crystallites of magnetic charges whose size can be controlled by tuning the lattice constant. We find excellent agreement between experimental data and Monte Carlo simulations of emergent charge–charge interactions.

Two-stage ordering of spins in dipolar spin ice on the kagome lattice.

Spin ice, a peculiar thermal state of a frustrated ferromagnet on the pyrochlore lattice, has a finite entropy density and excitations carrying magnetic charge. By combining analytical arguments and Monte Carlo simulations, we show that spin ice on the two-dimensional kagome lattice orders in two stages. The intermediate phase has ordered magnetic charges and is separated from the paramagnetic phase by an Ising transition. The transition to the low-temperature phase is of the three-state Potts or Kosterlitz-Thouless type, depending on the presence of defects in the charge order.

Dynamics of domain walls in magnetic nanostrips.

We express the dynamics of domain walls in ferromagnetic nanowires in terms of collective coordinates, generalizing Thieles steady-state results. For weak external perturbations the dynamics is dominated by a few soft modes. The general approach is illustrated on the example of a vortex wall relevant to recent experiments with flat nanowires. A two-mode approximation gives a quantitatively accurate description of both the steady viscous motion of the wall in weak magnetic fields and its oscillatory behavior in moderately high fields above the Walker breakdown.

Dynamics of a vortex domain wall in a magnetic nanostrip: application of the collective-coordinate approach

The motion of a vortex domain wall in a ferromagnetic strip of submicron width under the influence of an external magnetic field exhibits three distinct dynamical regimes. In a viscous regime at low fields the wall moves rigidly with a velocity proportional to the field. Above a critical field the viscous motion breaks down, giving way to oscillations accompanied by a slow drift of the wall. At still higher fields the drift velocity starts rising with the field again but with a much lower mobility

Topological defects as relics of emergent continuous symmetry and Higgs condensation of disorder in ferroelectrics

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Transmission of light through quantum heterostructures modulated by coherent acoustic phonons

than in the viscous regime. To describe the dynamics of the wall, we use the method of collective coordinates that focuses on soft modes of the system. By retaining two soft modes, parametrized by the coordinates of the vortex core, we obtain a simple description of the wall dynamics at low and intermediate applied fields that applies to both the viscous and oscillatory regimes below and above the breakdown. The calculated dynamics agrees well with micromagnetic simulations at low and intermediate values of the driving field. In higher fields, additional modes become soft and the two-mode approximation is no longer sufficient. We explain some of the significant features of vortex-domain-wall motion in high fields through the inclusion of additional modes associated with the half antivortices on the strip edge.

Periodical corrugated structure for forming sampled fiber Bragg grating and long-period fiber grating with tunable coupling strength

An imaging study of vortex proliferation near a continuous phase transition in a ferroelectric reveals frozen-in vortices that follow the predictions of the Kibble–Zurek model for cosmological strings formed in the early Universe.