Spin injection and perpendicular spin transport in graphite nanostructures

Abstract

Organic and carbon-based materials are attractive for spintronics because their small spin-orbit coupling and low hyperfine interaction is expected to give rise to large spin-relaxation times. However, the corresponding spin-relaxation length is not necessarily large when transport is via weakly interacting molecular orbitals. Here we use graphite as a model system and study spin transport in the direction perpendicular to the weakly bonded graphene sheets. We achieve injection of highly (75%) spin-polarized electrons into graphite nanostructures of 300-500 nm across and up to 17 nm thick, and observe transport without any measurable loss of spin information. Direct visualization of local spin transport in graphite-based spin-valve sandwiches also shows spatially uniform and near-unity transmission for electrons at 1.8 eV above the Fermi level.

References in corpus (8)

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• Spin relaxation in a nanowire organic spin valve: Observation of extremely long spin relaxation times
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Cited by in corpus (10)

• Colloquium: Spintronics in graphene and other two-dimensional materials
• Graphene-Passivated Nickel as an Oxidation-Resistant Electrode for Spintronics
• Tunnel Magnetoresistance with Atomically Thin Two-Dimensional Hexagonal Boron Nitride Barriers
• Gate-tunable spin-charge conversion and a role of spin-orbit interaction in graphene
• Molecular Spintronics
• Observation of spin-charge conversion in CVD-grown single-layer graphene
• Hot electron transport in a strongly correlated transition metal oxide
• Spin-dependent transport for armchair-edge graphene nanoribbons between ferromagnetic leads
• Large local Hall effect in pin-hole dominated multigraphene spin-valves
• Bias dependent features in spin transport as a probe of the conduction band minima in Si