Degenerate and nondegenerate parametric excitation in yttrium iron garnet nanostructures

We study experimentally the processes of parametric excitation in microscopic magnetically saturated disks of nanometer-thick yttrium iron garnet. We show that, depending on the relative orientation of the parametric pumping field and the static magnetization, excitation of either degenerate or nondegenerate magnon pairs is possible. In the latter case, which is particularly important for applications associated with the realization of computation in the reciprocal space, a single-frequency pumping can generate pairs of magnons whose frequencies correspond to different eigenmodes of the disk. We show that, depending on the size of the disk and the modes involved, the frequency difference in a pair can vary in the range 0.1–0.8 GHz. We demonstrate that in this system, one can easily realize a practically important situation where several magnon pairs share the same mode. We also observe the simultaneous generation of up to six different modes using a fixed-frequency monochromatic pumping. Our experimental findings are supported by numerical calculations that allow us to unambiguously identify the excited modes. Our results open new possibilities for the implementation of reciprocal-space computing.