Dimensional crossover in spin Hall oscillators

Andrew Smith, Kemal Sobotkiewich, Amanatullah Khan, Eric A. Montoya, Liu Yang, Zheng Duan, Tobias Schneider, Kilian Lenz, Jürgen Lindner, Kyongmo An, Xiaoqin Li, Ilya N. Krivorotov

Published 2020-05-05Version 1

Auto-oscillations of magnetization driven by direct spin current have been previously observed in multiple quasi-zero-dimensional (0D) ferromagnetic systems such as nanomagnets and nanocontacts. Recently, it was shown that pure spin Hall current can excite coherent auto-oscillatory dynamics in quasi-one-dimensional (1D) ferromagnetic nanowires but not in quasi-two-dimensional (2D) ferromagnetic films. Here we study the 1D to 2D dimensional crossover of current-driven magnetization dynamics in wire-based Pt/$\mathrm{Ni}_{80}\mathrm{Fe}_{20}$ bilayer spin Hall oscillators via varying the wire width. We find that increasing the wire width results in an increase of the number of excited auto-oscillatory modes accompanied by a decrease of the amplitude and coherence of each mode. We also observe a crossover from a hard to a soft onset of the auto-oscillations with increasing the wire width. The amplitude of auto-oscillations rapidly decreases with increasing temperature suggesting that interactions of the phase-coherent auto-oscillatory modes with incoherent thermal magnons plays an important role in suppression of the auto-oscillatory dynamics. Our measurements set the upper limit on the dimensions of an individual spin Hall oscillator and elucidate the mechanisms leading to suppression of coherent auto-oscillations with increasing oscillator size.