Gilbert damping in metallic ferromagnets from Schwinger-Keldysh field theory: Intrinsically nonlocal, nonuniform, and made anisotropic by spin-orbit coupling
Date
2024-01-12
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Publisher
Physical Review B
Abstract
Understanding the origin of damping mechanisms in the magnetization dynamics of metallic ferromagnets is a fundamental problem for nonequilibrium many-body physics of systems in which quantum conduction electrons interact with localized spins assumed to be governed by the classical Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert (LLG) equation. It is also of critical importance for applications because damping affects energy consumption and the speed of spintronic and magnonic devices. Since the 1970s, a variety of linear-response and scattering theory approaches have been developed to produce widely used formulas for computation of the spatially independent Gilbert scalar parameter as the magnitude of the Gilbert damping term in the LLG equation. The Schwinger-Keldysh field theory (SKFT), largely unexploited for this purpose, offers additional possibilities, such as to rigorously derive an extended LLG equation by integrating quantum electrons out. Here we derive such an equation whose Gilbert damping for metallic ferromagnets is nonlocal, i.e., dependent on all localized spins at a given time, and nonuniform, even if all localized spins are collinear and spin-orbit coupling (SOC) is absent. This is in sharp contrast to standard lore, in which nonlocal damping is considered to emerge only if localized spins are noncollinear—for such situations, direct comparison using the example of a magnetic domain wall shows that SKFT-derived nonlocal damping is an order of magnitude larger than the previously considered one. Switching on SOC makes such nonlocal damping anisotropic, in contrast to standard lore, in which SOC is usually necessary to obtain a nonzero Gilbert damping scalar parameter. Our analytical formulas, with their nonlocality being more prominent in low spatial dimensions, are fully corroborated by numerically exact quantum-classical simulations.
Description
This article was originally published in Physical Review B. The version of record is available at: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.109.024413. ©2024 American Physical Society
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Citation
Reyes-Osorio, Felipe, and Branislav K. Nikolić. “Gilbert Damping in Metallic Ferromagnets from Schwinger-Keldysh Field Theory: Intrinsically Nonlocal, Nonuniform, and Made Anisotropic by Spin-Orbit Coupling.” Physical Review B 109, no. 2 (January 12, 2024): 024413. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.109.024413.