Nonreciprocal Surface Acoustic Waves in Multilayers with Magnetoelastic and Interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya Interactions

Surface acoustic waves (SAWs) propagating in a piezoelectric substrate covered with a thin ferromagnetic-heavy-metal bilayer are found to exhibit a substantial degree of nonreciprocity, i.e., the frequencies of these waves are nondegenerate with respect to the inversion of the SAW propagation direction. The simultaneous action of the magnetoelastic interaction in the ferromagnetic layer and the interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction in the ferromagnetic-heavy-metal interface results in the openings of magnetoelastic band gaps in the SAW spectrum, and the frequency position of these band gaps is different for opposite SAW propagation directions. The band-gap widths and the frequency separation between them can be controlled by a proper selection of the magnetization angle and the thickness of the ferromagnetic layer. Using numerical simulations, we demonstrate that the isolation between SAWs propagating in opposite directions in such a system can exceed the direct SAW propagation losses by more than 1 order of magnitude.