Probing excitations in insulators via injection of spin-currents

Abstract

We propose a spin transport experiment to measure the low-energy excitations in insulators with spin degrees of freedom, with a focus on detecting ground states that lack magnetic order. A general formalism to compute the spin-current from a metal with a non-equilibrium distribution of spins to an insulator is developed. It is applied to insulating states with and without long range magnetic order, and salient features in the spin-conductance are noted.