Dresden 2006 – scientific programme
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MA: Magnetismus
MA 21: Invited Talks Hickey / Temst
MA 21.1: Invited Talk
Wednesday, March 29, 2006, 14:00–14:30, HSZ 03
Spin Transport across interfaces — •B J Hickey1, L Michez1, K McKenna1, G J Morgan1, S Shatz2, and N Wiser2 — 1E C Stoner Laboratory, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK — 2Department of Physics, Bar-Ilan Univeristy, Ramat Gan, Israel
A fundamental aspect of the operation of any spintronic device is the transport of electrons across an interface. It is accepted that spin-dependent scattering, mainly at interfaces, is at the heart of spintronics but there are many experimental examples that theory cannot easily explain. In this talk we shall review some of the more intriguing results and discuss how well they are presently understood. It is well-known that the accumulation of spin near interfaces is an intrinsic feature of transport in magnetic multilayers. It has, until recently, been thought that this feature was intimately connected with electron scattering. It was thought that for currents applied perpendicular to the plane of the layers, the relaxation length for the spin accumulation, the spin diffusion length, was also the length scale for determining the electron transport. We shall present new experimental data which investigates the effects of interface scattering as a function of the number of interfaces and the proximity of the scattering interfaces. We shall show that these results can be understood without the need to introduce spin-flip scattering and that the length scale for the transport is the momentum relaxation length - the mean free path. Additionally, we shall confirm these results in calculations where we have developed models of transport in spintronic devices which incorporate spin-relaxation through spin-orbit scattering.