Charge and spin transport in magnetic tunnel junctions: Microscopic theory

We study the charge and spin currents passing through a magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) on the basis of a tightbinding model. The currents are evaluated perturbatively with respect to the tunnel Hamiltonian. The charge current has the form A[M ₁(t) x M ₁(t) ₁ · M ₂ + BM ₁(t) · M ₂, where M ₁(t) and M ₂ denote the directions of the magnetization in the free layer and fixed layer, respectively. The constant A vanishes when one or both layers are insulators, while the constant B disappears when both layers are insulators or the same ferromagnets. The first term in the expression for charge current represents dissipation driven by the effective electric field induced by the dynamic magnetization. In addition, from an investigation of the spin current, we obtain the microscopic expression for the enhanced Gilbert damping constant Δα. We show that Δα is proportional to the tunnel conductance and depends on the bias voltage.