Magnetically Ordered Insulators for Advanced Spintronics

TL;DR

This paper reviews the potential of magnetically ordered insulators in spintronics, emphasizing their ability to generate pure spin currents via magnons and the recent advances enabling new device concepts and fundamental research.

Contribution

It highlights recent progress in materials and physics understanding that facilitate novel spintronic devices using insulating magnetic materials.

Findings

Magnons enable pure spin current generation in insulators.

Spin Hall effect achieves 10% efficiency in spin-charge interconversion.

Advances open new opportunities for device innovation and fundamental studies.

Abstract

Magnetically ordered, electrically insulating materials pave the way towards novel spintronic devices. In these materials the flow of magnetic excitations such as magnons results in pure spin currents. These spin currents can be driven by gradients of the spin chemical potential and/or temperature such that they can play the same role in novel spintronic devices as charge currents in traditional electronic circuits. Connecting spin current based and charge current based devices requires spin to charge interconversion. This has been achieved by the spin Hall effect with an efficiency of several 10%. The recent progress in materials development and understanding of pure spin current physics opens up a plethora of novel device concepts and opportunities for fundamental studies.