Spin rectification by planar Hall effect in synthetic antiferromagnets

Abstract

We study spin rectification effects in NiFe/Ru/NiFe synthetic antiferromagnets at the saturated, non-collinear and antiparallel magnetic states. The change in magnetization orientation at these states allows us to study the angle dependence of spin rectification phenomena by only changing the applied field. This approach avoids the need of changing the sample orientation within the experiment for this kind of studies. Our results show large planar Hall effect contributions to the measured spin rectified voltage with interesting features in the non-collinear and antiparallel states, which bring new possibilities for device design and applications. The results improve the understanding of electrically detected ferromagnetic resonance signals, not only for synthetic antiferromagnets, but also for other samples where the signals coming from the anisotropic magneto resistance effect and the inverse spin hall effect are superimposed.