Spin relaxation through Kondo scattering in Cu/Py lateral spin valves

Abstract

The temperature dependence of the spin diffusion length typically reflects the scattering mechanism responsible for spin relaxation. Within non-magnetic metals it is reasonable to expect the Elliot-Yafet mechanism to play a role and thus the temperature dependence of the spin diffusion length might be inversely proportional to resistivity. In lateral spin valves measurements have found that at low temperatures the spin diffusion length unexpected decreases. By measuring the transport properties of lateral Py/Cu/Py spin valves fabricated with different purities of Cu, we extract a spin diffusion length which shows this suppression below 30K only in the presence of the Kondo effect. We have calculated the spin-relaxation rate and isolated the contributions from magnetic impurities. We find the spin-flip probability of a magnetic impurity to be 34%. Our semi-quantitative analysis demonstrates the dominant role of Kondo scattering in spin relaxation, even in low concentrations of order 1 p.p.m., and hence accounts for the reduction in spin diffusion length observed by ourselves and others.

References in corpus (4)

• Control of spin injection by direct current in lateral spin valves
• Contribution of defects to the spin relaxation in copper nanowires
• Temperature dependence of spin polarization in ferromagnetic metals using lateral spin valves
• Spin-dependent Seebeck effect in non-local spin valve devices

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Spin diffusion length of Permalloy using spin absorption in lateral spin valves
• Kondo effect in a quantum wire with spin-orbit coupling
• Direct Evidence for Suppression of the Kondo Effect due to Pure Spin Current
• Theory of Kondo suppression of spin polarization in nonlocal spin valves
• Investigation of spin scattering mechanism in silicon channels of Fe/MgO/Si lateral spin valves
• Detection of the interfacial exchange field at a ferromagnetic insulator-nonmagnetic metal interface with pure spin currents
• Revealing the importance of interfaces for pure spin current transport
• Unusual Scaling of Kondo Spin Relaxation