Length Scale of the Spin Seebeck Effect

Andreas Kehlberger, Ulrike Ritzmann, Denise Hinzke, Er-Jia Guo, Joel Cramer, Gerhard Jakob, Mehmet C. Onbasli, Dong Hun Kim, Caroline A. Ross, Matthias B. Jungfleisch, Burkard Hillebrands, Ulrich Nowak, and Mathias Kläui
Phys. Rev. Lett. 115, 096602 – Published 28 August 2015
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Abstract

We investigate the origin of the spin Seebeck effect in yttrium iron garnet (YIG) samples for film thicknesses from 20 nm to 50μm at room temperature and 50 K. Our results reveal a characteristic increase of the longitudinal spin Seebeck effect amplitude with the thickness of the insulating ferrimagnetic YIG, which levels off at a critical thickness that increases with decreasing temperature. The observed behavior cannot be explained as an interface effect or by variations of the material parameters. Comparison to numerical simulations of thermal magnonic spin currents yields qualitative agreement for the thickness dependence resulting from the finite magnon propagation length. This allows us to trace the origin of the observed signals to genuine bulk magnonic spin currents due to the spin Seebeck effect ruling out an interface origin and allowing us to gauge the reach of thermally excited magnons in this system for different temperatures. At low temperature, even quantitative agreement with the simulations is found.

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  • Received 15 March 2015

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.115.096602

© 2015 American Physical Society

Authors & Affiliations

Andreas Kehlberger1,*, Ulrike Ritzmann2, Denise Hinzke2, Er-Jia Guo1, Joel Cramer1, Gerhard Jakob1, Mehmet C. Onbasli3, Dong Hun Kim3, Caroline A. Ross3, Matthias B. Jungfleisch4,5, Burkard Hillebrands5, Ulrich Nowak2, and Mathias Kläui1,*

  • 1Institute of Physics, Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, 55099 Mainz, Germany
  • 2Department of Physics, University of Konstanz, D-78457 Konstanz, Germany
  • 3Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA
  • 4Materials Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, Illinois 60439, USA
  • 5Fachbereich Physik and Landesforschungszentrum OPTIMAS, Technische Universität Kaiserslautern, Kaiserslautern 67663, Germany

  • *Also at Graduate School Materials Science in Mainz, Staudinger Weg 9, 55128, Germany.

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Issue

Vol. 115, Iss. 9 — 28 August 2015

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