The artificial patterning of continuous materials into nanoscale structures provides an excellent opportunity for designing novel materials with unique, unforeseen properties. This concept of so-called patterned "metamaterials" having essentially modified energy spectra provides basis for new directions in physics and materials science, including photonics, plasmonics, phononics and magnonics. Moreover, metamaterials hold a promise for novel technological applications within integrated architectures with smart functionalities, optoelectronic constituents of integrated circuits, means for nanoscale thermal transport control, and charge-free storage and manipulation of information. Artificial magnetic materials with periodically modulated properties, magnonic crystals (MCs), offer two main distinctive features of direct benefit for modern technology. Firstly, MCs facilitate tuneable spin excitation spectra controlled via magnetic field. Secondly, being non-volatile materials, they lend themselves to applications in which re-programmability is required.

With this vision in mind, the teams united by the MagIC consortium are already carrying out robust, internationally leading research programmes in the area of magnonics and its cross-disciplinary developments into photonics, phononics and electronics. This academic mobility project aims to build upon the programmes so as to establish a multi-lateral exchange and cross-fertilisation of ideas and expertise among our teams and thereby to achieve a step change in the consortium's cumulative efficiency, productivity and predictive power, as a result of the added value generated through the collaboration.

Within the project, the main "purely magnonic" research directions generating new knowledge will be (i) exploration of nonlinear effects in MCs, (ii) tailoring and suppression of the effective energy losses in MCs, (iii) development of theoretical models of the spin wave generation and scattering on the nanoscale, (iv) investigation of effects of broken periodicity (including fractal structures) on the magnonic spectra. In addition, MagIC will take advantage of the yet unexplored opportunities arising from the coexistence within a single nanostructure of magnonic functionalities and those of photonics, plasmonics and phononics. Joining complementary expertises of the project participants, as well as exploiting other synergies, will facilitate sharing of knowledge and new skills acquisition for the research team members and will help reaching the project goals.

These ambitious goals are consistent with the volume of the proposed academic exchange (involving 39 researchers via 168 person-months of visits in 4 years), which will allow us both to strengthen the already existing collaborations and to establish new links among the participating four EU and three Ukrainian research teams (83 months of visits from EU to Ukraine and 85 vice-versa), each already striving to advance the aforementioned research fields with help of national research funding. The proposed programmes of network-wide events (5 project meetings, workshop, magnonic school, 2 conferences and seminars) and outreach activities will complement the standard ways of dissemination of our results to both the research and non-specialist communities. Reaching the project goals will allow to establish Europe as international leader in the area of patterned magnetic nanostructures and artificial metamaterials of a wide functionality.