Green's function formalism for spin transport in metal-insulator-metal heterostructures

Abstract

We develop a Green's function formalism for spin transport through heterostructures that contain metallic leads and insulating ferromagnets. While this formalism in principle allows for the inclusion of various magnonic interactions, we focus on Gilbert damping. As an application, we consider ballistic spin transport by exchange magnons in a metal-insulator-metal heterostructure with and without disorder. For the former case, we show that the interplay between disorder and Gilbert damping leads to spin current fluctuations. For the case without disorder, we obtain the dependence of the transmitted spin current on the thickness of the ferromagnet. Moreover, we show that the results of the Green's function formalism agree in the clean and continuum limit with those obtained from the linearized stochastic Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert equation. The developed Green's function formalism is a natural starting point for numerical studies of magnon transport in heterostructures that contain normal metals and magnetic insulators.