Giant magnon spin conductivity approaching the two-dimensional transport regime in ultrathin yttrium iron garnet films

Abstract

Conductivities are key material parameters that govern various types of transport (electronic charge, spin, heat etc.) driven by thermodynamic forces. Magnons, the elementary excitations of the magnetic order, flow under the gradient of a magnon chemical potential in proportion to a magnon (spin) conductivity ${\sigma }_m$. The magnetic insulator yttrium iron garnet (YIG) is the material of choice for efficient magnon spin transport. Here we report an unexpected giant ${\sigma }_m$ in record-thin YIG films with thicknesses down to 3.7 nm when the number of occupied two-dimensional (2D) subbands is reduced from a large number to a few, which corresponds to a transition from 3D to 2D magnon transport. We extract a 2D spin conductivity ($\approx 1$ S) at room temperature, comparable to the (electronic) spin conductivity of the high-mobility two-dimensional electron gas in GaAs quantum wells at millikelvin temperatures. Such high conductivities offer unique opportunities to develop low-dissipation magnon-based spintronic devices.

References in corpus (11)

• Hybrid magnonics: physics, circuits and applications for coherent information processing
• Measurements of the exchange stiffness of YIG films by microwave resonance techniques
• Spin Insulatronics
• Magnon-phonon interactions in magnetic insulators
• Direct observation of magnon-phonon coupling in yttrium iron garnet
• Influence of yttrium iron garnet thickness and heater opacity on the nonlocal transport of electrically and thermally excited magnons
• Evidence for spin current driven Bose-Einstein condensation of magnons
• Surface dynamics of rough magnetic films
• All-electrical Magnon Transport Experiments in Magnetically Ordered Insulators
• Electrically induced strong modulation of magnons transport in ultrathin magnetic insulator films
• A generalized model of magnon kinetics and subgap magnetic noise

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