Conduction of spin currents through insulating antiferromagnetic oxides

By C. Hahn, G. de Loubens, V. Naletov, J. Ben Youssef, O. Klein, M. Viret. 2013

145 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Damping processes, associated to magnetization dynamics, allow to generate spin currents from precessing ferromagnets. These can be transmitted into adjacent conducting layers through an interface exchange interaction with conduction electrons. It is in principle also possible to inject angular momentum into insulators but the relevant physical mechanisms are not yet identified. In order to test some ideas concerning pure spin transport through insulating oxides, the present paper reports on the behaviour of two materials with very different properties: NiO is an antiferromagnet whereas SiO2 is a non-magnetic light element insulator. While a sizeable flow of angular momentum is found to be able to propagate through nickel oxide, a SiO2 layer as thin as 2 nm completely blocks this transfer. This underlines some essential features required to conduct a spin current, including the presence of either magnetic order through which magnons can propagate, or compounds with large spin-orbit interactions where phonons can carry angular momentum.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6582f82f56b25e6c23c3c27e2c41430f4ad86c19

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. Y. Tserkovnyak
2. A. Manchon
3. A. Brataas
4. B. V. van Wees
5. M. Tsoi
6. T. Ono
7. V. Baltz
8. T. Moriyama

In Materials Chemistry

1. Y. Tserkovnyak
2. T. Ono
3. A. Manchon
4. V. Baltz
5. M. Tsoi
6. T. Moriyama

Citations in the corpus

• Antiferromagnetic spintronics (2016, background): “H. Wang et al. (2014) also confirmed robust spin propagation in NiO up to 100 nm thick (i.e., a characteristic decay length of around 10 nm, see Table V).”
• Spin insulatronics (2020, background): “In FIs, the reduced dissipation rate reflected in the smaller Gilbert damping constant can facilitate spin-torque oscillators at lower applied currents.”