Chiral-Damping-Enhanced Magnon Transmission

The inevitable Gilbert damping in magnetization dynamics is usually regarded as detrimental to spin transport. Here we apply a general feature of chiral non-Hermitian dynamics to a ferromagnetic-insulator–normal-metal heterostructure to show that the strong momentum dependence and chirality of the eddy-current-induced damping also causes beneficial scattering properties: A potential barrier that reflects magnon wave packets becomes unidirectionally transparent in the presence of a metallic cap layer. Passive magnon gates that turn presumably harmful dissipation into useful functionalities should be useful for future quantum magnonic devices.