Boosting Room Temperature Tunnel Magnetoresistance in Hybrid Magnetic Tunnel Junctions Under Electric Bias

Article published in Advanced Electronic Materials.

In this paper, recently published in Advanced Electronic Materials, Farkhad Aliev (member of IFIMAC) with his PhD student César González-Ruano resolved in an elegant way one of the main challenges in room temperature spintronics, related with the degradation of tunneling magnetoresistance at high applied biases. Together with collaborators from Universite Poincare of Nancy, France, they designed, fabricated, and investigated magnetotransport in an essentially new type of spintronic structure (more specifically, V/MgO/Fe/MgO/Fe/Co hybrids) where tunneling magnetoresistance (TMR) could be boosted by an applied bias voltage up to 0.5 V. They demonstrate that this unusual behavior happens because the main tunneling current is controlled by Rashba spin orbit interaction at the V/MgO interface. The novel concept to fabricate spintronic devices demonstrated in this work may open a new avenue for the new research area of spintronic devices operating at high applied bias. [Full article]