Bottleneck Accumulation of Hybrid Magnetoelastic Bosons

An ensemble of magnons, quanta of spin waves, can be prepared as a Bose gas of weakly interacting quasiparticles. Furthermore, the thermalization of the overpopulated magnon gas through magnon-magnon scattering processes, which conserve the number of particles, can lead to the formation of a Bose-Einstein condensate at the bottom of a spin-wave spectrum. However, magnon-phonon scattering can significantly modify this scenario and new quasiparticles are formed-magnetoelastic bosons. Our observations of a parametrically populated magnon gas in a single-crystal film of yttrium iron garnet by means of wave-vector-resolved Brillouin light scattering spectroscopy evidence a novel condensation phenomenon: A spontaneous accumulation of hybrid magnetoelastic bosonic quasiparticles at the intersection of the lowest magnon mode and a transversal acoustic wave.