Nonlocal magnon spin transport in NiFe2O4 thin films

Abstract

We report magnon spin transport in nickel ferrite platinum (Pt)/(NiFe2O4, NFO) bilayer systems at room temperature. A nonlocal geometry is employed, where the magnons are excited by the spin Hall effect or by the Joule heating induced spin Seebeck effect at the Pt injector and detected at a certain distance away by the inverse spin Hall effect at the Pt detector. The dependence of the nonlocal magnon spin signals as a function of the magnetic field is closely related to the NFO magnetization behavior. In contrast, we observe that the magnetoresistance measured locally at the Pt injector does not show a clear relationship with the average NFO magnetization. We obtain a magnon spin relaxation length of 3.1 ± 0.2 μm in the investigated NFO samples.