Low magnon damping of a EuSe film down to millikelvin temperatures

Abstract

The rapid development of quantum magnonics over the past decade has created a demand for magnetic materials that keep their magnon losses low at millikelvin temperatures and add functionality beyond that of the established iron garnets and ferromagnetic metals. The europium chalcogenides are natural candidates $-$ they are magnetic semiconductors whose moment of $7\,μ_{\mathrm{B}}$ per Eu$^{2+}$ ion stems from a half-filled $4f$ shell with zero orbital momentum, so that spin-orbit coupling and intrinsic damping are expected to be weak. Here we characterize an epitaxial film of the metamagnet EuSe on diamagnetic BaF$_2$ by magnetometry and broadband ferromagnetic resonance from 10 K down to 30 mK. EuSe combines a saturation magnetization of 1100 kA/m with antiferromagnetic, ferrimagnetic and ferromagnetic phases that are reached with fields below 0.25 T. In contrast to a Gilbert-damped ferromagnet, the linewidth of the field-aligned film decreases with increasing frequency and field, and below 750 mK it no longer depends on temperature. At 30 mK, 68 GHz and 1.8 T, it reaches 5.5 mT, close to the values of bulk single crystals, which corresponds to a magnon lifetime of 2 ns and to an upper bound of $1.1\times10^{-3}$ for the Gilbert damping parameter. These properties make EuSe and the europium chalcogenides promising materials for hybrid quantum systems and quantum magnonics.