Improvement of the yttrium iron garnet/platinum interface for spin pumping-based applications

The dependence of the spin pumping efficiency and the spin mixing conductance on the surface processing of yttrium iron garnet (YIG) before the platinum (Pt) deposition has been investigated quantitatively. The ferromagnetic resonance driven spin pumping injects a spin polarized current into the Pt layer, which is transformed into an electromotive force by the inverse spin Hall effect. Our experiments show that the spin pumping effect indeed strongly depends on the YIG/Pt interface condition. We measure an enhancement of the inverse spin Hall voltage and the spin mixing conductance by more than two orders of magnitude with improved sample preparation. (C) 2013 AIP Publishing LLC.