Gilbert damping in metallic ferromagnets from Schwinger-Keldysh field theory: Intrinsically nonlocal and nonuniform, and made anisotropic by spin-orbit coupling

TL;DR

This paper derives a nonlocal, nonuniform, and anisotropic Gilbert damping model for metallic ferromagnets using Schwinger-Keldysh field theory, revealing effects beyond traditional local damping theories and impacting spintronic device design.

Contribution

It introduces a rigorous derivation of an extended LLG equation with nonlocal and anisotropic damping terms using SKFT, challenging standard assumptions about damping origins.

Findings

Nonlocal damping is significant even in collinear spins without SOC.

Nonlocal damping magnitude exceeds traditional models by an order of magnitude.

SOC induces anisotropy in damping, even in uniform spin configurations.

Abstract

Understanding the origin of damping mechanisms in magnetization dynamics of metallic ferromagnets is a fundamental problem for nonequilibrium many-body physics of systems where quantum conduction electrons interact with localized spins assumed to be governed by the classical Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert (LLG) equation. It is also of critical importance for applications, as damping affects energy consumption and speed of spintronic and magnonic devices. Since the 1970s, a variety of linear-response and scattering theory approaches have been developed to produce widely used formulas for computation of spatially-independent Gilbert scalar parameter as the magnitude of the Gilbert damping term in the LLG equation. The largely unexploited for this purpose Schwinger-Keldysh field theory (SKFT) offers additional possibilities, such as to rigorously derive an extended LLG equation by integrating quantum electrons out. Here we derive such equation whose Gilbert damping for metallic ferromagnets is nonlocal, i.e., dependent on all localized spins at a given time, and nonuniform, even if all localized spins are collinear and spin-orbit coupling (SOC) is absent. This is in sharp contrast to standard lore, where nonlocal damping is considered to emerge only if localized spins are noncollinear; for such situations, direct comparison on the example of magnetic domain wall shows that SKFT-derived nonlocal damping is an order of magnitude larger than the previously considered one. Switching on SOC makes such nonlocal damping anisotropic, in contrast to standard lore where SOC is usually necessary to obtain nonzero Gilbert damping scalar parameter. Our analytical formulas, with their nonlocality being more prominent in low spatial dimensions, are fully corroborated by numerically exact quantum-classical simulations.