2024/03/28 by Mahsa Seyed Heydari, Wolfgang Belzig, Heydari, Mahsa Seyed +3
Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Magnetic properties of thin films #Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics (cond-mat.mes-hall) #Quantum Physics (quant-ph) #Quantum and electron transport phenomena #Surface and Thin Film Phenomena
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2403.19277
openalex publication_date 2024/03/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Motivated by experimental work showing enhancement of spin transport between Yttrium Iron Garnet and Platinum by a thin antiferromagnetic insulator between them, we consider spin transport through the interface of a non-magnetic metal and compensated antiferromagnetically ordered insulator and focus on the significance of the interface itself. The spin transport is carried by spin-polarized electrons in the metal and by magnons in the insulator. We compute the spin current in the presence of a spin accumulation in the metal, cause by the spin Hall effect, and a thermal gradient using Fermi's Golden Rule in the presence of interfacial disorder. For a perfectly clean interface, the in-plane momentum is conserved by the electron-magnon scattering events that govern the spin transport through the interface. We calculate how disorder-induced broadening of scattering matrix elements with respect to the in-plane momentum influences the spin current. As a general result, we observe that for many experimental setups, specifically for high temperatures, one should expect a rather small effect of interface disorder on the measured spin current, while for small temperatures there is a significant reduction of a spin current with increasing disorder.