Study of the magnetic anisotropy of the multiphase samples of the ferrimagnets with hexagonal crystal structure by the method of ferromagnetic resonance

The influence of machining conditions in a planetary ball mill on the phase composition, structural and magnetic parameters of hexaferrite powders composition BaFe12O19 was investigated. The properties of powders vary greatly depending on the power density and the time of machining. Magnetocrystalline anisotropy of multiphase powders was studied by the method of ferromagnetic resonance. The effective field of magnetic anisotropy is reduced by more than two times, with decreasing particle size of ~ 67 nm to ~ 10 nm when the processing time equal to 10 minutes. The flow of mechanochemical reactions during grinding leads to the disintegration of the hexagonal crystal phase and the formation of the magnetite phase with a small value of the magnetocrystalline anisotropy field

Electric Control of Spin Injection into a Ferroelectric Semiconductor

Electric-field control of spin-dependent properties has become one of the most attractive phenomena in modern materials research due to the promise of new device functionalities. One of the paradigms in this approach is to electrically toggle the spin polarization of carriers injected into a semiconductor using ferroelectric polarization as a control parameter. Using first-principles density-functional calculations, we explore the effect of ferroelectric polarization of electron-doped BaTiO3 (n-BaTiO3) on the spin-polarized transmission across the SrRuO3/n-BaTiO3(001) interface. Our study reveals that, in this system, the interface transmission is negatively spin polarized and that ferroelectric polarization reversal leads to a change in the transport spin polarization from −65% to −98%. Analytical model calculations demonstrate that this is a general effect for ferromagnetic-metal–ferroelectric-semiconductor systems and, furthermore, that ferroelectric modulation can even reverse the sign of spin polarization. The predicted effect provides a nonvolatile mechanism to electrically control spin injection in semiconductor-based spintronics devices

Giant Electroresistance in Ferroelectric Tunnel Junctions

The interplay between the electron transport in metal/ferroelectric/metal junctions with ultrathin ferroelectric barriers and the polarization state of a barrier is investigated. Using a model which takes into account screening of polarization charges in metallic electrodes and direct quantum tunneling across a ferroelectric barrier we calculate the change in the tunneling conductance associated with the polarization switching. We find the conductance change of a few orders of magnitude for metallic electrodes with significantly different screening lengths. This giant electroresistance effect is the consequence of a different potential profile seen by transport electrons for the two opposite polarization orientations.Comment: 4 page

Ferroelectric Dead Layer Driven by a Polar Interface

Based on first-principles and model calculations we investigate the effect of polar interfaces on the ferroelectric stability of thin-film ferroelectrics. As a representative model, we consider a TiO2-terminated BaTiO3 film with LaO monolayers at the two interfaces that serve as doping layers. We find that the polar interfaces create an intrinsic electric field that is screened by the electron charge leaking into the BaTiO3 layer. The amount of the leaking charge is controlled by the boundary conditions which are different for three heterostructures considered, namely Vacuum/LaO/BaTiO3/LaO, LaO/BaTiO3, and SrRuO3/LaO/BaTiO3/LaO. The intrinsic electric field forces ionic displacements in BaTiO3 to produce the electric polarization directed into the interior of the BaTiO3 layer. This creates a ferroelectric dead layer near the interfaces that is non-switchable and thus detrimental to ferroelectricity. Our first-principles and model calculations demonstrate that the effect is stronger for a larger effective ionic charge at the interface and longer screening length due to a stronger intrinsic electric field that penetrates deeper into the ferroelectric. The predicted mechanism for a ferroelectric dead layer at the interface controls the critical thickness for ferroelectricity in systems with polar interfaces.Comment: 33 Pages, 5 figure

Anomalous behaviors of the charge and spin degrees of freedom in the CuO double chains of PrBa2_2Cu4_4O8_8

The density-matrix renormalization-group method is used to study the electronic states of a two-chain Hubbard model for CuO double chains of PrBa$_2$Cu$_4$O$_8$. We show that the model at quarter filling has the charge ordered phases with stripe-type and in-line--type patterns in the parameter space, and in-between, there appears a wide region of vanishing charge gap; the latter phase is characteristic of either Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid or a metallic state with a spin gap. We argue that the low-energy electronic state of the CuO double chains of PrBa$_2$Cu$_4$O$_8$ should be in the metallic state with a possibly small spin gap.Comment: REVTEX 4, 10 pages, 9 figures; submitted to PR

Spin blockade in ferromagnetic nanocontacts

Using a free-electron model and a linear response theory we investigate spin-dependent electronic transport in magnetic nanocontacts in the ballistic regime of conduction. We emphasize the fact that in atomic-size ferromagnetic contacts it is possible to achieve the conductance value of e2/h, which implies a fully spin-polarized electric current. We explore some consequences of this phenomenon. In particular, we show that the presence of a nonmagnetic region in the nanocontact separating two ferromagnetic electrodes can lead to a spin blockade resulting in very large values of magnetoresistance

Pauli blockade of the electron spin flip in bulk GaAs

By means of time-resolved optical orientation under strong optical pumping, the k-dependence of the electron spin-flip time (t_sf) in undoped GaAs is experimentally determined. t_sf monotonically decreases by more than one order of magnitude when the electron kinetic energy varies from 2 to 30 meV. At the high excitation densities and low temperatures of the reported experiments the main spin-flip mechanism of the conduction band electrons is the Bir-Aronov-Pikus. By means of Monte-Carlo simulations we evidence that phase-space filling effects result in the blocking of the spin flip, yielding an increase of t_sf with excitation density. These effects obtain values of t_sf up to 30 ns at k=0, the longest reported spin-relaxation time in undoped GaAs in the absence of a magnetic field.Comment: new author added, major changes in section IV (phenomenological model), minor changes throughout the entire manuscrip