Green's function formalism for spin transport in metal-insulator-metal heterostructures

Jiansen Zheng, Scott Bender, Jogundas Armaitis, Roberto E. Troncoso, and Rembert A. Duine
Phys. Rev. B 96, 174422 – Published 17 November 2017

Abstract

We develop a Green's function formalism for spin transport through heterostructures that contain metallic leads and insulating ferromagnets. While this formalism in principle allows for the inclusion of various magnonic interactions, we focus on Gilbert damping. As an application, we consider ballistic spin transport by exchange magnons in a metal-insulator-metal heterostructure with and without disorder. For the former case, we show that the interplay between disorder and Gilbert damping leads to spin current fluctuations. For the case without disorder, we obtain the dependence of the transmitted spin current on the thickness of the ferromagnet. Moreover, we show that the results of the Green's function formalism agree in the clean and continuum limit with those obtained from the linearized stochastic Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert equation. The developed Green's function formalism is a natural starting point for numerical studies of magnon transport in heterostructures that contain normal metals and magnetic insulators.

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  • Received 29 September 2017

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.96.174422

©2017 American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

  1. Research Areas
Condensed Matter, Materials & Applied Physics

Authors & Affiliations

Jiansen Zheng1, Scott Bender1, Jogundas Armaitis2, Roberto E. Troncoso3,4, and Rembert A. Duine1,5

  • 1Institute for Theoretical Physics and Center for Extreme Matter and Emergent Phenomena, Utrecht University, Leuvenlaan 4, 3584 CE Utrecht, The Netherlands
  • 2Institute of Theoretical Physics and Astronomy, Vilnius University, Saulėtekio Ave. 3, LT-10222 Vilnius, Lithuania
  • 3Department of Physics, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, NO-7491 Trondheim, Norway
  • 4Departamento de Física, Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, Avenida España 1680, Valparaíso, Chile
  • 5Department of Applied Physics, Eindhoven University of Technology, P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands

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Issue

Vol. 96, Iss. 17 — 1 November 2017

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