Spin backflow and ac voltage generation by spin pumping and the inverse spin Hall effect

Abstract

The spin current pumped by a precessing ferromagnet into an adjacent normal metal has a constant polarization component parallel to the precession axis and a rotating one normal to the magnetization. The former is now routinely detected as a dc voltage induced by the inverse spin Hall effect (ISHE). Here we compute ac ISHE voltages much larger than the dc signals for various material combinations and discuss optimal conditions to observe the effect. The backflow of spin is shown to be essential to distill parameters from measured ISHE voltages for both dc and ac configurations.