Signatures of electron-magnon interaction in charge and spin currents through magnetic tunnel junctions: A nonequilibrium many-body perturbation theory approach

Abstract

We develop a numerically exact scheme for resumming certain classes of Feynman diagrams in the self-consistent perturbative expansion for the electron and magnon self-energies in the nonequilibrium Green function formalism applied to a coupled electron-magnon (e-m) system driven out of equilibrium by the applied finite bias voltage. Our scheme operates with the electronic and magnonic GFs and the corresponding self-energies viewed as matrices in the Keldysh space, rather than conventionally extracting their retarded and lesser components, which greatly simplifies translation of diagrams into compact mathematical expressions and their computational implementation. This is employed to understand the effect of inelastic e-m scattering on charge and spin current vs bias voltage ${V}_{b}$ in F/I/F (F-ferromagnet; I-insulating barrier) magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs), which are modeled on a quasi-one-dimensional (quasi-1D) tight-binding lattice for the electronic subsystem and quasi-1D Heisenberg model for the magnonic subsystem. For this purpose, we evaluate the Fock diagram for the electronic self-energy and the electron-hole polarization bubble diagram for the magnonic self-energy. The respective electronic and magnonic GF lines within these diagrams are the fully interacting ones, thereby requiring to solve the ensuing coupled system of nonlinear integral equations self-consistently. Despite using the quasi-1D model and treating e-m interaction in many-body fashion only within a small active region consisting of few lattice sites around the F/I interface, our analysis captures essential features of the so-called zero-bias anomaly observed [V. Drewello, J. Schmalhorst, A. Thomas, and G. Reiss, Phys. Rev. B 77, 014440 (2008)] in both MgO- and ${\mathrm{AlO}}_{x}\ensuremath{-}$based realistic 3D MTJs where the second derivative ${d}^{2}I/d{V}_{b}^{2}$ (i.e., inelastic electron tunneling spectrum) of charge current exhibits sharp peaks of opposite sign on either side ${V}_{b}=0$. We show that this is closely related to a substantially modified magnonic density of states (DOS) after the e-m interaction is turned on---the magnonic bandwidth over which DOS is nonzero becomes broadened, thereby making e-m scattering at arbitrary small bias voltage possible, while DOS also acquires peaks (on the top of a continuous background) signifying the formation of quasibound states of magnons dressed by the cloud of electron-hole pair excitations. We also demonstrate that the sum of electronic spin currents in all of the semi-infinite leads attached to the active region quantifies the loss of spin angular momentum carried away from the active region by the magnonic spin current.