Origin of the light-induced spin currents in heavy metal/magnetic insulator bilayers

Abstract

Light-induced spin currents with the faster response is essential for the more efficient information transmission and processing. Herein, we systematically explore the effect of light illumination energy and direction on the light-induced spin currents in the W/Y₃Fe₅O₁₂ heterojunction. Light-induced spin currents can be clearly categorized into two types. One is excited by the low light intensity, which mainly involves the photo-generated spin current from spin photovoltaic effect. The other is caused by the high light intensity, which is the light-thermally induced spin current and mainly excited by spin Seebeck effect. Under low light-intensity illumination, light-thermally induced temperature gradient is very small so that spin Seebeck effect can be neglected. Furthermore, the mechanism on spin photovoltaic effect is fully elucidated, where the photo-generated spin current in Y₃Fe₅O₁₂ mainly originates from the process of spin precession induced by photons. These findings provide some deep insights into the origin of light-induced spin current.

The authors study the light-induced spin current observed in W/Y₃Fe₅O₁₂ heterojunctions, elucidating the photo-generated spin current, rather than light-thermally induced spin current, by photon-magnon interaction.