TY - JOUR
T1 - Calculating the spin memory loss at Cu|metal interfaces from first principles
AU - Liu, Ruixi
AU - Gupta, Kriti
AU - Kelly, Paul J.
AU - Yuan, Zhe
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 authors. Published by the American Physical Society. Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.
PY - 2022/7/5
Y1 - 2022/7/5
N2 - The role played by interfaces in metallic multilayers is not only to change the momenta of incident electrons; their symmetry lowering also results in an enhancement of the effects of spin-orbit coupling, in particular, the flipping of the spins of conduction electrons. This leads to a significant reduction of a spin current through a metallic interface that is quantitatively characterized by a dimensionless parameter δ called the spin memory loss (SML) parameter, the interface counterpart of the spin-flip diffusion length for bulk metals. In this paper, we use first-principles scattering calculations that include temperature-induced lattice and spin disorder to systematically study three parameters that govern spin transport through metallic interfaces of Cu with Pt, Pd, Py (permalloy), and Co: the interface resistance, spin polarization, and the SML. The value of δ for a Cu|Pt interface is found to be comparable to what we recently reported for a Au|Pt interface [Gupta, Phys. Rev. Lett. 124, 087702 (2020)0031-900710.1103/PhysRevLett.124.087702]. For Cu|Py and Cu|Co interfaces, δ decreases monotonically with increasing temperature to become negligibly small at room temperature. The calculated results are in good agreement with currently available experimental values in the literature. Inserting a Cu layer between Pt and the Py or Co layers slightly increases the total spin current dissipation at these compound interfaces.
AB - The role played by interfaces in metallic multilayers is not only to change the momenta of incident electrons; their symmetry lowering also results in an enhancement of the effects of spin-orbit coupling, in particular, the flipping of the spins of conduction electrons. This leads to a significant reduction of a spin current through a metallic interface that is quantitatively characterized by a dimensionless parameter δ called the spin memory loss (SML) parameter, the interface counterpart of the spin-flip diffusion length for bulk metals. In this paper, we use first-principles scattering calculations that include temperature-induced lattice and spin disorder to systematically study three parameters that govern spin transport through metallic interfaces of Cu with Pt, Pd, Py (permalloy), and Co: the interface resistance, spin polarization, and the SML. The value of δ for a Cu|Pt interface is found to be comparable to what we recently reported for a Au|Pt interface [Gupta, Phys. Rev. Lett. 124, 087702 (2020)0031-900710.1103/PhysRevLett.124.087702]. For Cu|Py and Cu|Co interfaces, δ decreases monotonically with increasing temperature to become negligibly small at room temperature. The calculated results are in good agreement with currently available experimental values in the literature. Inserting a Cu layer between Pt and the Py or Co layers slightly increases the total spin current dissipation at these compound interfaces.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85134775918&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1103/PhysRevB.106.014401
DO - 10.1103/PhysRevB.106.014401
M3 - Article
SN - 2469-9950
VL - 106
JO - Physical review B: Covering condensed matter and materials physics
JF - Physical review B: Covering condensed matter and materials physics
IS - 1
M1 - 014401
ER -