Magnetic Transport in Spin Antiferromagnets for Spintronics Applications

Had magnetic monopoles been ubiquitous as electrons are, we would probably have had a different form of matter, and power plants based on currents of these magnetic charges would have been a familiar scene of modern technology. Magnetic dipoles do exist, however, and in principle one could wonder if we can use them to generate magnetic currents. In the present work, we address the issue of generating magnetic currents and magnetic thermal currents in electrically-insulating low-dimensional Heisenberg antiferromagnets by invoking the (broken) electricity-magnetism duality symmetry. The ground state of these materials is a spin-liquid state that can be described well via the Jordan–Wigner fermions, which permit an easy definition of the magnetic particle and thermal currents. The magnetic and magnetic thermal conductivities are calculated in the present work using the bond–mean field theory. The spin-liquid states in these antiferromagnets are either gapless or gapped liquids of spinless fermions whose flow defines a current just as the one defined for electrons in a Fermi liquid. The driving force for the magnetic current is a magnetic field with a gradient along the magnetic conductor. We predict the generation of a magneto-motive force and realization of magnetic circuits using low-dimensional Heisenberg antiferromagnets. The present work is also about claiming that what the experiments in spintronics attempt to do is trying to treat the magnetic degrees of freedoms on the same footing as the electronic ones.