Generation of out-of-plane polarized spin current by spin swapping

Abstract

The generation of spin currents and their application to the manipulation of magnetic states is fundamental to spintronics. Of particular interest are chiral antiferromagnets that exhibit properties typical of ferromagnetic materials even though they have negligible magnetization. Here, we report the generation of a robust spin current with both in-plane and out-of-plane spin polarization in epitaxial thin films of the chiral antiferromagnet Mn3Sn in proximity to permalloy thin layers. By employing temperature-dependent spin-torque ferromagnetic resonance, we find that the chiral antiferromagnetic structure of Mn3Sn is responsible for an in-plane polarized spin current that is generated from the interior of the Mn3Sn layer and whose temperature dependence follows that of this layer's antiferromagnetic order. On the other hand, the out-of-plane spin polarized spin current is unrelated to the chiral antiferromagnetic structure and is instead the result of scattering from the Mn3Sn/permalloy interface. We substantiate the later conclusion by performing studies with several other non-magnetic metals all of which are found to exhibit out-of-plane polarized spin currents arising from the spin swapping effect.

17 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (7)

• Direct electronic measurement of the spin Hall effect
• Observation of spin splitting torque in a collinear antiferromagnet RuO2
• Tilted spin current generated by the collinear antiferromagnet RuO2
• Orbitronics: Orbital Currents in Solids
• Spin-orbit torques in NbSe${}_2$/Permalloy bilayers
• Interfacial spin-orbit torques
• Evaluation of spin diffusion length and spin Hall angle of antiferromagnetic Weyl semimetal Mn${}_3$Sn

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Efficient generation of out-of-plane polarized spin current in polycrystalline heavy metal devices with broken electric symmetries
• Topological nature of the proper spin current and the spin-Hall torque
• Spin-Hall effect in topological materials: Evaluating the proper spin current in systems with arbitrary degeneracies
• Vector spin Seebeck effect and spin swapping effect in antiferromagnetic insulators with non-collinear spin structure
• Enhancing z spin generation in trivial spin Hall materials for scalable, energy-efficient, field-free, complete spin-orbit torque switching applications
• Characterizing Spin-Orbit Torques by Tensorial Spin Hall Magnetoresistance
• Reliable Magnetometry for Antiferromagnets and Thin Films: Correcting Substrate Artifacts in Mn3Sn/MgO Systems