Ballistic Spin Injection and Detection in Fe/Semiconductor/Fe Junctions
Abstract
We present {\it ab initio} calculations of the spin-dependent electronic transport in Fe/GaAs/Fe and Fe/ZnSe/Fe (001) junctions simulating the situation of a spin-injection experiment. We follow a ballistic Landauer-B\"uttiker approach for the calculation of the spin-dependent dc conductance in the linear-responce regime, in the limit of zero temperature. We show that the bulk band structure of the leads and of the semiconductor, and even more the electronic structure of a clean and abrupt interface, are responsible for a current polarisation and a magnetoresistance ratio of almost the ideal 100%, if the transport is ballistic. In particular we study the significance of the transmission resonances caused by the presence of two interfaces.
Cite
@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0203538,
title = {Ballistic Spin Injection and Detection in Fe/Semiconductor/Fe Junctions},
author = {Phivos Mavropoulos and Olaf Wunnicke and Peter H. Dederichs},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0203538},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
13 pages, 9 figures