Long-distance transport of magnon spin information in a magnetic insulator at room temperature

By L. Cornelissen, J. Liu, R. Duine, J. Youssef, Van Wees. Nature Physics, 2015

795 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Although electron motion is prohibited in magnetic insulators, the electron spin can be transported by magnons. Such magnons, generated and detected using all-electrical methods, are now shown to travel micrometre distances at room temperature. The transport of spin information has been studied in various materials, such as metals1, semiconductors2 and graphene3. In these materials, spin is transported by the diffusion of conduction electrons4. Here we study the diffusion and relaxation of spin in a magnetic insulator, where the large bandgap prohibits the motion of electrons. Spin can still be transported, however, through the diffusion of non-equilibrium magnons, the quanta of spin-wave excitations in magnetically ordered materials. Here we show experimentally that these magnons can be excited and detected fully electrically5,6,7 in a linear response, and can transport spin angular momentum through the magnetic insulator yttrium iron garnet (YIG) over distances as large as 40 μm. We identify two transport regimes: the diffusion-limited regime for distances shorter than the magnon spin diffusion length, and the relaxation-limited regime for larger distances. With a model similar to the diffusion–relaxation model for electron spin transport in (semi)conducting materials, we extract the magnon spin diffusion length λ = 9.4 ± 0.6 μm in a thin 200 nm YIG film at room temperature.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7283f8386ef00f937ebcfe03bec135bb280e9f6b

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. Pietro Gambardella
2. T. Jungwirth
3. J. Sinova
4. A. Manchon
5. I. Miron
6. Kevin Garello
7. A. Thiaville
8. J. Železný

In Materials Chemistry

1. J. Sinova
2. Jiang Xiao
3. Pietro Gambardella
4. Y. Tserkovnyak
5. H. Schultheiss
6. T. Ono
7. A. Manchon
8. V. Baltz

Citations in the corpus

• Magnetic texture based magnonics (2020, methodology): “[269] have used two Pt strips to inject and detect spin-wave spin current based on the spin Hall effect and inverse spin Hall effect.”
• Current-induced spin-orbit torques in ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic systems (2018, methodology): “Using a non-local setup consisting of two parallel Pt electrodes deposited on an extended YIG film, Cornelissen et al. (2015) and Goennenwein et al.”
• Antiferromagnetic spintronics (2016, background): “This contrastswith the thermal spin current that decays inmagnetic insulators over a temperature-dependent spin-diffusion length of magnons (Cornelissen et al., 2015).”