Perspectives of Electrically generated spin currents in ferromagnetic materials

Angie Davidson, Vivek P. Amin, Wafa S. Aljuaid, Paul M. Haney, Xin Fan

Published 2019-06-27Version 1

Spin-orbit coupling enables charge currents to give rise to spin currents and vice versa, which has applications in non-volatile magnetic memories, miniature microwave oscillators, thermoelectric converters and Terahertz devices. In the past two decades, a considerable amount of research has focused on electrical spin current generation in different types of nonmagnetic materials. However, electrical spin current generation in ferromagnetic materials has only recently been actively investigated. Due to the additional symmetry breaking by the magnetization, ferromagnetic materials generate spin currents with different orientations of spin direction from those observed in nonmagnetic materials. Studies centered on ferromagnets where spin-orbit coupling plays an important role in transport open new possibilities to generate and detect spin currents. We summarize recent developments on this subject and discuss unanswered questions in this emerging field.