paper

Nonmonotonic inelastic tunneling spectra due to surface spin excitations in ferromagnetic junctions

arXiv:cond-mat/0401460 · doi:10.1140/epjb/e2011-20271-2

Abstract

The paper addresses inelastic spin-flip tunneling accompanied by surface spin excitations (magnons) in ferromagnetic junctions. The inelastic tunneling current is proportional to the magnon density of states which is energy-independent for the surface waves and, for this reason, cannot account for the bias-voltage dependence of the observed inelastic tunneling spectra. This paper shows that the bias-voltage dependence of the tunneling spectra can arise from the tunneling matrix elements of the electron-magnon interaction. These matrix elements are derived from the Coulomb exchange interaction using the itinerant-electron model of magnon-assisted tunneling. The results for the inelastic tunneling spectra, based on the nonequilibrium Green's function calculations, are presented for both parallel and antiparallel magnetizations in the ferromagnetic leads.

9 pages, 4 figures, version as published

References in corpus (5)