No Arabic abstract
We report the experimental observation of longitudinal spin Seebeck effect in a multiferroic helimagnet Ba0.5Sr1.5Zn2Fe12O22. Temperature gradient applied normal to Ba0.5Sr1.5Zn2Fe12O22/Pt interface generates inverse spin Hall voltage of spin current origin in Pt, whose magnitude was found to be proportional to bulk magnetization of Ba0.5Sr1.5Zn2Fe12O22 even through the successive magnetic transitions among various helimagnetic and ferrimagnetic phases. This finding demonstrates that the helimagnetic spin wave can be an effective carrier of spin current. By controlling the population ratio of spin-helicity domains characterized by clockwise/counter-clockwise manner of spin rotation with use of poling electric field in the ferroelectric helimagnetic phase, we found that spin-helicity domain distribution does not affect the magnitude of spin current injected into Pt. The results suggest that the spin-wave spin current is rather robust against the spin-helicity domain wall, unlike the case with the conventional ferromagnetic domain wall.
Longitudinal spin Seebeck effect has been investigated for an uniaxial antiferromagnetic insulator Cr2O3, characterized by a spin-flop transition under magnetic field along the c-axis. We have found that temperature gradient applied normal to Cr2O3/Pt interface induces inverse spin Hall voltage of spin current origin in Pt, whose magnitude turns out to be always proportional to magnetization in Cr2O3. The observed voltage shows significant enhancement for the lower temperature region, which can be ascribed to the phonon-drag effect on the relevant spin excitations. The above results establish that antiferromagnetic spin waves with high frequency above 100 GHz can be an effective carrier of spin current.
We use a low-temperature scanning tunneling microscope to study the interplay between the Kondo effect of a single-atom contact and a spin current. To this end, a nickel tip is coated by a thick layer of copper and brought into contact with a single Co atom adsorbed on a Cu(100) surface. We show that upon contact the Kondo resonance of Co is spin split and attribute the splitting to the spin current produced by the nickel tip and flowing across the copper spacer. A quantitative line shape analysis indicates that the spin polarization of the junction amounts up to 18%, but decreases when a pristine nickel tip is directly contacted to the Co atom.
Photovoltaic effect, e.g., solar cells, converts light into DC electric current. This phenomenon takes place in various setups such as in noncentrosymmetric crystals and semiconductor pn junctions. Recently, we proposed a theory for producing DC spin current in magnets using electromagnetic waves, i.e., the spin-current counterpart of the solar cells. Our calculation shows that the nonlinear conductivity for the spin current is nonzero in a variety of noncentrosymmetric magnets, implying that the phenomenon is ubiquitous in inversion-asymmetric materials with magnetic excitations. Intuitively, this phenomenon is a bulk photovoltaic effect of magnetic excitations, where electrons and holes, visible light, and inversion-asymmetric semiconductors are replaced with magnons or spinons, THz or GHz waves, and asymmetric magnetic insulators, respectively. We also show that the photon-driven spin current is shift current type, and as a result, the current is stable against impurity scattering. This bulk photovoltaic spin current is in sharp contrast to that of well-known spin pumping that takes place at the interface between a magnet and a metal.
Using a four-band Hamiltonian, we study the phase boundary of spin-polarized-current state (SPCS) of interacting electrons in bilayer graphene. The model of spin-polarized-current state has previously been shown to resolve a number of experimental puzzles in bilayer graphene. The phase boundaries of the SPCS with and without the external voltage between the two layers are obtained in this work. An unusual phase boundary where there are two transition temperatures for a given carrier concentration is found at finite external voltage. The physics of this phenomenon is explained.
CrAs is a well-known helimagnet with the double-helix structure originating from the competition between the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI) and antiferromagnetic exchange interaction $J$. By resonant soft X-ray scattering (RSXS), we observe the magnetic peak (0~0~$q_m$) that emerges at the helical transition with $T_S$ $approx$ 267.5 K. Intriguingly, the helimagnetic domains significantly shrink on cooling below $sim$255 K, opposite to the conventional thermal effect. The weakening of DMI on cooling is found to play a critical role here. It causes the helical wave vector to vary, ordered spins to rotate, and extra helimagnetic domain boundaries to form at local defects, thus leading to the anomalous shrinkage of helimagnetic domains. Our results indicate that the size of magnetic helical domains can be controlled by tuning DMI in certain helimagnets.