Since the discovery of giant magnetoresistance in 1980s, Spintronics became an exciting field which studies numerous phenomena including the spin transport in magnetic heterostructures, magnetization dynamics and the interplay between them. I have investigated different topics during my graduate research. In this dissertation, I summarize all my projects including spin pumping, spin convertance and spin injection into ballistic medium.
First, we develop a linear response formalism for spin pumping effect. Spin pumping refers that a precessing emits a spin current into its adjacent nonmagnetic surroundings, which was originally proposed using scattering theory. The newly developed formalism is demonstrated to be identical the early theory in limiting case. While our formalism is convenient to include the effects of disorders and spin-orbit coupling which can resolve the quantitative controversies between early theory and experiments. Second, the spin pumping experiments indicates a much smaller spin Hall angle compared with the results obtained via the spin transfer torque measurements. We found that such issues can be resolved when taking into consideration the effects of non-local conductivity. And we conclude neither of the two methods measures the real spin Hall angle while the spin pumping methods provides much accurate estimations. Third, we developed the spin transport equations in weak scattering medium in the presence of spin-orbit coupling. Before this, all spin dependent electron transport has been modeled by the conventional spin diffusion equation. While recent spin injection experiments have seen the failure of spin diffusion equation. As the experimental fitting using spin diffusion models led to unrealistic conclusions. At last, we study the spin convertance in anti-ferromagnetic multilayers, where the spin information can be mutually transferred between ferromagnetic/anti-ferromagnetic and conduction electrons. Our theory successfully explained the experiment results that the insertion of thin NiO film between YIG/Pt largely enhances the spin Seebeck currents.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:arizona.edu/oai:arizona.openrepository.com:10150/626524 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Chen, Kai, Chen, Kai |
| Contributors | Zhang, Shufeng, Wang, Weigang, LeRoy, Brian, Stafford, Charles |
| Publisher | The University of Arizona. |
| Source Sets | University of Arizona |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text, Electronic Dissertation |
| Rights | Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. |
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