Magnon-mediated spin currents in Tm3Fe5O12/Pt with perpendicular magnetic anisotropy

Abstract

The control of pure spin currents carried by magnons in magnetic insulator (MI) garnet films with a robust perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (PMA) is of great interest to spintronic technology as they can be used to carry, transport, and process information. Garnet films with PMA have labyrinth domain magnetic structures that enrich the magnetization dynamics and could be employed in more efficient wave-based logic and memory computing devices. In MI/non-magnetic (NM) bilayers, where NM is a normal metal providing a strong spin–orbit coupling, the PMA benefits the spin–orbit torque-driven magnetization switching by lowering the needed current and rendering the process faster, crucial for developing magnetic random-access memories. In this work, we investigated the magnetic anisotropies in thulium iron garnet (TIG) films with PMA via ferromagnetic resonance measurements, followed by the excitation and detection of magnon-mediated pure spin currents in TIG/Pt driven by microwaves and heat currents. TIG films presented a Gilbert damping constant of α ≈0.01, with resonance fields above 3.5 kOe and half linewidths broader than 60 Oe, at 300 K and 9.5 GHz. The spin-to-charge current conversion through TIG/Pt was observed as a microvoltage generated at the edges of the Pt film. The obtained spin Seebeck coefficient was 0.54 μV/K, also confirming the high interfacial spin transparency.