Suppression of spin-pumping by a MgO tunnel-barrier

Spin-pumping generates pure spin currents in normal metals at the ferromagnet (F)/normal metal (N) interface. The efficiency of spin-pumping is given by the spin mixing conductance, which depends on N and the F/N interface. We directly study the spin-pumping through an MgO tunnel-barrier using the inverse spin Hall effect, which couples spin and charge currents and provides a direct electrical detection of spin currents in the normal metal. We find that spin-pumping is suppressed by the tunnel-barrier, which is contrary to recent studies that suggest that the spin mixing conductance can be enhanced by a tunnel-barrier inserted at the interface

Surface-enhanced optical third-harmonic generation in Ag island films

Surface-enhanced optical third-harmonic generation (THG) is observed in silver island films. The THG intensity from Ag nanoparticles is enhanced by more than two orders of magnitude with respect to the THG intensity from a smooth and homogeneous silver surface. This enhancement is attributed to local plasmon excitation and resonance of the local field at the third-harmonic wavelength. The diffuse and depolarized component of the enhanced THG is associated with the third-order hyper-Rayleigh scattering in a 2-D random array of silver nanoparticles.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

A UPC++ Actor Library and Its Evaluation on a Shallow Water Proxy Application

Programmability is one of the key challenges of Exascale Computing. Using the actor model for distributed computations may be one solution. The actor model separates computation from communication while still enabling their over-lap. Each actor possesses specified communication endpoints to publish and receive information. Computations are undertaken based on the data available on these channels. We present a library that implements this programming model using UPC++, a PGAS library, and evaluate three different parallelization strategies, one based on rank-sequential execution, one based on multiple threads in a rank, and one based on OpenMP tasks. In an evaluation of our library using shallow water proxy applications, our solution compares favorably against an earlier implementation based on X10, and a BSP-based approach

Surface spin flip probability of mesoscopic Ag wires

Spin relaxation in mesoscopic Ag wires in the diffusive transport regime is studied via nonlocal spin valve and Hanle effect measurements performed on permalloy/Ag lateral spin valves. The ratio between momentum and spin relaxation times is not constant at low temperatures. This can be explained with the Elliott-Yafet spin relaxation mechanism by considering the momentum surface relaxation time as being temperature dependent. We present a model to separately determine spin flip probabilities for phonon, impurity and surface scattering and find that the spin flip probability is highest for surface scattering.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Magnetic Vortex Core Dynamics in a Ferromagnetic Dot

We report direct imaging by means of x-ray photoemission electron microscopy of the dynamics of magnetic vortices confined in micron-size circular Permalloy dots that are 30 nm thick. The vortex core positions oscillate on a 10-ns timescale in a self-induced magnetostatic potential well after the in-plane magnetic field is turned off. The measured oscillation frequencies as a function of the aspect ratio (thickness/radius) of the dots are in agreement with theoretical calculations presented for the same geometry.Comment: 18 pages including 4 figure

Magnetic Structure in Fe/Sm-Co Exchange Spring Bilayers with Intermixed Interfaces

The depth profile of the intrinsic magnetic properties in an Fe/Sm-Co bilayer fabricated under nearly optimal spring-magnet conditions was determined by complementary studies of polarized neutron reflectometry and micromagnetic simulations. We found that at the Fe/Sm-Co interface the magnetic properties change gradually at the length scale of 8 nm. In this intermixed interfacial region, the saturation magnetization and magnetic anisotropy are lower and the exchange stiffness is higher than values estimated from the model based on a mixture of Fe and Sm-Co phases. Therefore, the intermixed interface yields superior exchange coupling between the Fe and Sm-Co layers, but at the cost of average magnetization.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figures and 1 tabl