Quantum effects for ballistic transport in spintronic devices
arXiv:0802.1436 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.78.094428
Abstract
Recent fabrication of atomic precision nanodevices for spintronics greatly boosted their performance and also revealed new interesting features, as oscillating magnetoresistance with number of atomic layers in a multilayered structure. This motivates the need to go beyond the usual theoretical approach of semi-classical continuous layers. Here the simple tight-binding dynamics is used to describe quantum conduction in a multicomponent system with spin-polarized electrodes separated by an ultrathin and atomically coherent non-magnetic spacer (either metallic or insulating). A possibility is indicated for obtaining a huge resonant enhancement of magnetoresistance in such device by a special choice of gate voltage on the spacer element.
9 pages, 9 figures