We report direct spectroscopic evidence of antimagnons, i.e., negative-energy spin waves identified by their signature inverted dispersion with Brillouin light scattering (BLS) spectroscopy. We investigate an ultrathin BiYIG film with a perpendicular magnetized anisotropy that compensates the demagnetizing field. By injecting a spin-orbit torque, the magnetization is driven into auto-oscillation and eventually into a non-equilibrium reversed state above a secondary current threshold (∼1.2×107~A/cm2). The dispersion is measured by wavevector-resolved BLS and exhibits a sharp change from an upward dispersion to a downward one, in agreement with theoretical predictions and micromagnetic simulations. Around the threshold current, we observe the coexistence of conventional magnons and antimagnons. Our work establishes antimagnons with inverted dispersion and is a first step towards exploring novel phenomena and applications due to magnon-antimagnon coupling, such as magnon amplification and magnon-antimagnon entanglement, which are part of the emerging field of antimagnonics.
@article{arxiv.2601.15231,
title = {Direct Observation of Antimagnons with Inverted Dispersion},
author = {Hanchen Wang and Junfeng Hu and Wenjie Song and Artim L. Bassant and Jinlong Wang and Haishen Peng and Emir Karadža and Paul Noël and William Legrand and Richard Schlitz and Jilei Chen and Song Liu and Dapeng Yu and Jean-Philippe Ansermet and Rembert A. Duine and Pietro Gambardella and Haiming Yu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.15231},
year = {2026}
}