0000000000139547
AUTHOR
Andreas Kehlberger
Thickness and power dependence of the spin-pumping effect inY3Fe5O12/Pt heterostructures measured by the inverse spin Hall effect
The dependence of the spin-pumping effect on the yttrium iron garnet $({\mathrm{Y}}_{3}{\mathrm{Fe}}_{5}{\mathrm{O}}_{12}$, YIG) thickness detected by the inverse spin Hall effect (ISHE) has been investigated quantitatively. Due to the spin-pumping effect driven by the magnetization precession in the ferrimagnetic insulator ${\mathrm{Y}}_{3}{\mathrm{Fe}}_{5}{\mathrm{O}}_{12}$ film a spin-polarized electron current is injected into the Pt layer. This spin current is transformed into electrical charge current by means of the ISHE. An increase of the ISHE voltage with increasing film thickness is observed and compared to the theoretically expected behavior. The effective damping parameter of t…
Modification of magnetic anisotropy in Ni thin films by poling of (011) PMN-PT piezosubstrates
ABSTRACTThis study reports the magnetic and magnetotransport properties of 20 nm thick polycrystalline Ni films deposited by magnetron sputtering on unpoled piezoelectric (011) [PbMg1/3Nb2/3O3]0.68-[PbTiO3]0.32 (PMN-PT) substrates. The magnetoresistance (MR), as well as the magnetization reversal, is found to depend on the polarization state of the piezosubstrate. Upon poling the PMN-PT substrate, which results in a transfer of strain to the Ni film, the MR value decreases by a factor of 12 at room temperature and a factor of 21 at 50 K for the current direction along the PMN-PT [100] direction, and slightly increases for the [01] current direction. Simultaneously, a strong increase in the …
Pulsed laser deposition of epitaxial yttrium iron garnet films with low Gilbert damping and bulk-like magnetization
Yttrium iron garnet (YIG, Y [subscript 3]Fe[subscript 5]O[subscript 12]) films have been epitaxially grown on Gadolinium Gallium Garnet (GGG, Gd[subscript 3]Ga[subscript 5]O[subscript 12]) substrates with (100) orientation using pulsed laser deposition. The films were single-phase, epitaxial with the GGG substrate, and the root-mean-square surface roughness varied between 0.14 nm and 0.2 nm. Films with thicknesses ranging from 17 to 200 nm exhibited low coercivity (<2 Oe), near-bulk room temperature saturation moments (∼135 emu cm[superscript −3]), in-plane easy axis, and damping parameters as low as 2.2 × 10[superscript −4]. These high quality YIG thin films are useful in the investigation…
Origin of the spin Seebeck effect probed by temperature dependent measurements in Gd$_{3}$Fe$_{5}$O$_{12}$
We probe the spin Seebeck effect in Gd$_{3}$Fe$_{5}$O$_{12}$/Pt hybrid structures as a function of temperature and observe two sign changes of the spin Seebeck signal with decreasing temperature. A first sign change occurs at a temperature close to the Gd$_{3}$Fe$_{5}$O$_{12}$ magnetic compensation point at around 280 K. There the spin Seebeck signal changes sign abruptly with unaltered amplitude, indicating that the spin current is mainly caused by the magnetic Fe sub-lattices, which reorient their directions at this temperature. A second, more gradual sign change takes place around the ordering temperature of the Gd sub-lattice in the range of 65-85 K, showing that the Gd magnetic sub-lat…
Origin of the spin Seebeck effect in compensated ferrimagnets
Magnons are the elementary excitations of a magnetically ordered system. In ferromagnets, only a single band of low-energy magnons needs to be considered, but in ferrimagnets the situation is more complex owing to different magnetic sublattices involved. In this case, low lying optical modes exist that can affect the dynamical response. Here we show that the spin Seebeck effect (SSE) is sensitive to the complexities of the magnon spectrum. The SSE is caused by thermally excited spin dynamics that are converted to a voltage by the inverse spin Hall effect at the interface to a heavy metal contact. By investigating the temperature dependence of the SSE in the ferrimagnet gadolinium iron garne…
Influence of thickness and interface on the low-temperature enhancement of the spin Seebeck effect in YIG films
The temperature-dependent longitudinal spin Seebeck effect (LSSE) in heavy metal (HM)/Y_{3}Fe_{5}O_{12} (YIG) hybrid structures is investigated as a function of YIG film thickness, magnetic field strength, and different HM detection materials. The LSSE signal shows a large enhancement with reductions in temperature, leading to a pronounced peak at low temperatures. We find that the LSSE peak temperature strongly depends on the film thickness as well as on the magnetic field. Our result can be well explained in the framework of magnon-driven LSSE by taking into account the temperature-dependent effective propagation length of thermally excited magnons in the bulk of the material. We further …
Magnetic field control of the spin Seebeck effect
The origin of the suppression of the longitudinal spin Seebeck effect by applied magnetic fields is studied. We perform numerical simulations of the stochastic Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert equation of motion for an atomistic spin model and calculate the magnon accumulation in linear temperature gradients for different strengths of applied magnetic fields and different length scales of the temperature gradient. We observe a decrease of the magnon accumulation with increasing magnetic field and we reveal that the origin of this effect is a field dependent change of the frequency distribution of the propagating magnons. With increasing field the magnonic spin currents are reduced due to a suppressi…
Thermal conductance of thin film YIG determined using Bayesian statistics
Thin film YIG (${\mathrm{Y}}_{3}{\mathrm{Fe}}_{5}{\mathrm{O}}_{12}$) is a prototypical material for experiments on thermally generated pure spin currents and the spin Seebeck effect. The $3\ensuremath{\omega}$ method is an established technique to measure the cross-plane thermal conductance of thin films, but cannot be used in YIG/GGG (${\mathrm{Ga}}_{3}{\mathrm{Gd}}_{5}{\mathrm{O}}_{12}$) systems in its standard form. We use two-dimensional modeling of heat transport and introduce a technique based on Bayesian statistics to evaluate measurement data taken from the $3\ensuremath{\omega}$ method. Our analysis method allows us to study material systems that have not been accessible with the c…
Determination of the origin of the spin Seebeck effect - bulk vs. interface effects
The observation of the spin Seebeck effect in insulators has meant a breakthrough for spin caloritronics due to the unique ability to generate pure spin currents by thermal excitations in insulating systems without moving charge carriers. Since the recent first observation, the underlying mechanism and the origin of the observed signals have been discussed highly controversially. Here we present a characteristic dependence of the longitudinal spin Seebeck effect amplitude on the thickness of the insulating ferromagnet (YIG). Our measurements show that the observed behavior cannot be explained by any effects originating from the interface, such as magnetic proximity effects in the spin detec…
Length Scale of the Spin Seebeck Effect
We investigate the origin of the spin Seebeck effect in yttrium iron garnet (YIG) samples for film thicknesses from 20 nm to 50 μm at room temperature and 50 K. Our results reveal a characteristic increase of the longitudinal spin Seebeck effect amplitude with the thickness of the insulating ferrimagnetic YIG, which levels off at a critical thickness that increases with decreasing temperature. The observed behavior cannot be explained as an interface effect or by variations of the material parameters. Comparison to numerical simulations of thermal magnonic spin currents yields qualitative agreement for the thickness dependence resulting from the finite magnon propagation length. This allow…
Electronic properties of Co2FeSi investigated by X-ray magnetic linear dichroism
We present experimental XMLD spectra measured on epitaxial (001)-oriented thin Co$_{2}$FeSi films, which are rich in features and depend sensitively on the degree of atomic order and interdiffusion from capping layers. Al- and Cr-capped films with different degrees of atomic order were prepared by DC magnetron sputtering by varying the deposition temperatures. The local structural properties of the film samples were additionally investigated by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) measurements. The XMLD spectra of the different samples show clear and uniform trends at the $L_{3,2}$ edges. The Al-capped samples show similar behavior as previous measured XMLD spectra of Co$_2$FeSi$_{0.6}$Al$_{0.4…
Magnon mode selective spin transport in compensated ferrimagnets
We investigate the generation of magnonic thermal spin currents and their mode selective spin transport across interfaces in insulating, compensated ferrimagnet/normal metal bilayer systems. The spin Seebeck effect signal exhibits a non-monotonic temperature dependence with two sign changes of the detected voltage signals. Using different ferrimagnetic garnets, we demonstrate the universality of the observed complex temperature dependence of the spin Seebeck effect. To understand its origin, we systematically vary the interface between the ferrimagnetic garnet and the metallic layer, and by using different metal layers we establish that interface effects play a dominating role. They do not …
Geometrical dependence of domain wall propagation and nucleation fields in magnetic domain wall sensor devices
We study the key domain wall properties in segmented nanowires loop-based structures used in domain wall based sensors. The two reasons for device failure, namely the distribution of domain wall propagation field (depinning) and the nucleation field are determined with Magneto-Optical Kerr Effect (MOKE) and Giant Magnetoresistance (GMR) measurements for thousands of elements to obtain significant statistics. Single layers of Ni$_{81}$Fe$_{19}$, a complete GMR stack with Co$_{90}$Fe$_{10}$/Ni$_{81}$Fe$_{19}$ as a free layer and a single layer of Co$_{90}$Fe$_{10}$ are deposited and industrially patterned to determine the influence of the shape anisotropy, the magnetocrystalline anisotropy an…
Electric field modification of magnetotransport in Ni thin films on (011) PMN-PT piezosubstrates
This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and AIP Publishing. This article appeared in Appl. Phys. Lett. 106, 062404 (2015) and may be found at https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4907775 This study reports the magnetotransport and magnetic properties of 20 nm-thick polycrystalline Ni films deposited by magnetron sputtering on unpoled piezoelectric (011) [PbMg1/3Nb2/3O3]0.68-[PbTiO3]0.32 (PMN-PT) substrates. The longitudinal magnetoresistance (MR) of the Ni films on (011) PMN-PT, measured at room temperature in the magnetic field range of −0.3 T < μ0H < 0.3 T, is found to depend on the crystallographic direction and polarization state …
Thermal generation of spin current in epitaxial CoFe2O4 thin films
The longitudinal spin Seebeck effect (LSSE) has been investigated in high-quality epitaxial CoFe2O4 (CFO) thin films. The thermally excited spin currents in the CFO films are electrically detected in adjacent Pt layers due to the inverse spin Hall effect (ISHE). The LSSE signal exhibits a linear increase with increasing temperature gradient, yielding a LSSE coefficient of ~100 nV/K at room temperature. The temperature dependence of the LSSE is investigated from room temperature down to 30 K, showing a significant reduction at low temperatures, revealing that the total amount of thermally generated magnons decreases. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the spin Seebeck effect is an effective to…
Strain-controlled domain wall injection into nanowires for sensor applications
We investigate experimentally the effects of externally applied strain on the injection of 180$^\circ$ domain walls (DW) from a nucleation pad into magnetic nanowires, as typically used for DW-based sensors. In our study the strain, generated by substrate bending, induces in the material a uniaxial anisotropy due to magnetoelastic coupling. To compare the strain effects, $Co_{40}Fe_{40}B_{20}$, $Ni$ and $Ni_{82}Fe_{18}$ samples with in-plane magnetization and different magnetoelastic coupling are deposited. In these samples, we measure the magnetic field required for the injection of a DW, by imaging differential contrast in a magneto-optical Kerr microscope. We find that strain increases t…
Quantitative analysis of magnetization reversal in Ni thin films on unpoled and poled (0 1 1) [PbMg1/3Nb2/3O3]0.68–[PbTiO3]0.32piezoelectric substrates
The field angle dependence of the magnetization reversal in 20 nm thick polycrystalline Ni films grown on piezoelectric (0 1 1) [PbMg1/3Nb2/3O3](0.68)-[PbTiO3](0.32) (PMN-PT) substrates is analysed quantitatively to study the magnetic anisotropy induced in the film by poling the piezosubstrate. While the PMN-PT is in the unpoled state, the magnetization reversal is almost isotropic as expected from the polycrystalline nature of the film and corresponding to an orientation ratio (OR) of 1.2. The orientation ratio is obtained by fitting the angular dependence of normalized remanent magnetization to an adapted Stoner-Wohlfarth relation. Upon poling the piezosubstrate, a strong uniaxial anisotr…
Enhanced Magneto-optic Kerr Effect and Magnetic Properties ofCeY2Fe5O12Epitaxial Thin Films
Integrated magneto-optical components require magnetic thin films for tuning of their parameters, and for many applications yttrium iron garnet (YIG) is the material of choice. The authors study high-quality cerium-substituted YIG thin films grown by pulsed laser deposition, which possess tunable magnetic anisotropy and a greatly enhanced magneto-optic Kerr effect, compared to conventional films. This discovery presents new opportunities for engineering tomorrow's magneto-optical and spintronic logic devices.