Magnons, the quanta of spin waves, could be used to encode information in beyond-Moore computing applications, and magnonic device components, including logic gates, transistors and units for non-Boolean computing, have already been developed. Magnonic directional couplers, which can function as circuit building blocks, have also been explored, but have been impractical because of their millimetre dimensions and multimode spectra. Here, we report a magnonic directional coupler based on yttrium iron garnet that has submicrometre dimensions. The coupler consists of single-mode waveguides with a width of 350 nm. We use the amplitude of a spin wave to encode information and to guide it to one of the two outputs of the coupler depending on the signal magnitude, frequency and the applied magnetic field. Using micromagnetic simulations, we also propose an integrated magnonic half-adder that consists of two directional couplers and we investigate its functionality for information processing within the magnon domain. The proposed half-adder is estimated to consume energy in the order of attojoules.

磁振子，即自旋波的量子，可以用于在摩尔外计算应用中对信息进行编码，并且已经开发了包括逻辑门，晶体管和非布尔计算单元在内的强磁设备组件。磁能定向耦合器也可以用作电路的组成部分，但已经进行了探索，但由于其毫米尺寸和多模频谱而不切实际。在这里，我们报告基于钇铁石榴石的磁控定向耦合器，具有亚微米级的尺寸。耦合器由宽度为350 nm的单模波导组成。我们使用自旋波的振幅来编码信息，并将其引导到耦合器的两个输出之一，具体取决于信号幅度，频率和所施加的磁场。使用微磁模拟，我们还提出了一个由两个定向耦合器组成的集成式强磁半加法器，并研究了其在磁振子域内进行信息处理的功能。估计所提议的半加器消耗的能量约为attojoules。