6 research outputs found
A first-principles study of tunneling magnetoresistance in Fe/MgAl2O4/Fe(001) magnetic tunnel junctions
We investigated the spin-dependent transport properties of Fe/MgAl2O4/Fe(001)
magnetic tunneling junctions (MTJs) on the basis of first-principles
calculations of the electronic structures and the ballistic conductance. The
calculated tunneling magnetoresistance (TMR) ratio of a Fe/MgAl2O4/Fe(001) MTJ
was about 160%, which was much smaller than that of a Fe/MgO/Fe(001) MTJ
(1600%) for the same barrier thickness. However, there was an evanescent state
with delta 1 symmetry in the energy gap around the Fermi level of normal spinel
MgAl2O4, indicating the possibility of a large TMR in Fe/MgAl2O4/Fe(001) MTJs.
The small TMR ratio of the Fe/MgAl2O4/Fe(001) MTJ was due to new conductive
channels in the minority spin states resulting from a band-folding effect in
the two-dimensional (2-D) Brillouin zone of the in-plane wave vector (k//) of
the Fe electrode. Since the in-plane cell size of MgAl2O4 is twice that of the
primitive in-plane cell size of bcc Fe, the bands in the boundary edges are
folded, and minority-spin states coupled with the delta 1 evanescent state in
the MgAl2O4 barrier appear at k//=0, which reduces the TMR ratio of the MTJs
significantly.Comment: 5 pages, 6 figures, 1 tabl