Long-distance spin transport is demonstrated
Spintronics requires spin-polarised electrons to maintain their magnetic orientation as current traverses through non-magnetic materials that lie between the magnetised electrodes. Finding a robust channel for this ‘spin transport’ over long distances will show manufacturers that a key step has been taken towards applications.
Polarised electrons tend to get depolarised in transit across many non-magnetic materials, such as metals and semiconductors. Carbon-based materials have been seen to limit depolarisation, as seen in the research team’s previous work on carbon nanotubes1. The carbon nanotubes research was published in Nature in 2007, and co-authored by Professor Albert Fert, who went on to win the Nobel Prize for Physics later that year for the discovery of ‘Giant Magnetoresistance’, which gave birth to modern disc-drive read heads and thus spintronics.
Nanotubes however present a practical problem in their application as they are difficult to place at specific locations in spintronic devices. By contrast it is easy to position flat sheets of graphene, which are like nanotubes that have been slit and unrolled. The resulting two-dimensional network of carbon atoms is nowadays well known for displaying exceptional electronic and mechanical properties, but the distance over which magnetically polarised electrons can travel without depolarisation has remained uncertain.
Novel devices to test spin transport
The research team, from the University of Cambridge, Aalto University in Finland, Parma University in Italy, and Diamond Light Source, developed a device whose performance was verified on the Nanoscience beamline (I06). The device consisted of four magnetised electrodes of the complex oxide La0.67Sr0.33MnO3, bridged by a five‑layer flake of graphene, forming two highly resistive interfaces. Of the 20 devices, made at the University of Cambridge, between the Department of Materials Science and the Cambridge Graphene Centre, only one showed the desired results, with the rest showing no result.
Professor Neil Mathur, Principal Investigator in the study, has been working with the I06 team on spintronics and magnetoresistance over the past seven years. Of the devices, he said: “Creating them was very tricky because the two materials – the electrodes and the graphene – are structurally and chemically very different. To combine them and create a good interface is rather unlikely, but after a lot of hard work we ended up with a device that demonstrated long spin transport.
"The principle behind the calculation is that you have the magnetisation of two electrodes parallel and antiparallel, you get high and low states of resistance, and hence you can calculate the spin diffusion length.”
Figure 1: Resistance RBC and magnetoresistance MRBC on decreasing (blue) and increasing (red) magnetic field. Dashed lines indicate RBC = 24.8 MΩ and RBC + DRBC = 25.6 MΩ for parallel and antiparallel electrode magnetisations, respectively. The antiparallel configuration is indicated by grey shading in 12.5 mT < |μ0H| < 34.5 mT.
Photo credit (homepage promo): 'Green for Go!' by Alan Perryman, adpated under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
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