How many electrons are needed to flip a local spin?

Abstract

Considering the spin of a local magnetic atom as a quantum mechanical operator, we illustrate the dynamics of a local spin interacting with a ballistic electron represented by a wave packet. This approach improves the semi-classical approximation and provides a complete quantum mechanical understanding for spin transfer phenomena. Sending spin-polarized electrons towards a local magnetic atom one after another, we estimate the minimum number of electrons needed to flip a local spin.

3 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Microwave Oscillations of a Nanomagnet Driven by a Spin-Polarized Current
• Modification of the Landau-Lifshitz Equation in the Presence of a Spin-Polarized Current in CMR and GMR Materials
• Magnetization reversal triggered by spin injection in magnetic nanowires
• Magnetoelectronic Spin Echo
• Spin Torque and its Relation to Spin Filtering

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Extraction of Singlet States from Noninteracting High-Dimensional Spins
• Implementing quantum gates through scattering between a static and a flying qubit
• Stroboscopic wavepacket description of non-equilibrium many-electron problems
• Impurity Scattering of Wave Packets on a Lattice
• Rising time of entanglement between scattering spins
• Transmission based tomography for spin qubits
• Quantum mechanics of spin transfer in coupled electron-spin chains
• Emerging nonequilibrium bound state in spin-current-local-spin scattering
• Selective writing and read-out of a register of static qubits