2008/04/16 by Tehseen Z. Raza, Raza, Tehseen Z., Hassan Raza +1
Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Magnetic properties of thin films #Materials Science (cond-mat.mtrl-sci) #Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics (cond-mat.mes-hall) #Quantum and electron transport phenomena #Surface and Thin Film Phenomena #cond-mat.mes-hall #cond-mat.mtrl-sci
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0804.2557
openalex publication_date 2008/04/16 · arxiv created 2009/02/24 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We present a computationally efficient transferable single-band tight-binding model (SBTB) for spin polarized transport in heterostructures with an effort to capture the band structure effects. As an example, we apply it to study transport through Fe-MgO-Fe(100) magnetic tunnel junction devices. We propose a novel approach to extract suitable tight-binding parameters for a material by using the energy resolved transmission as the benchmark, which inherently has the bandstructure effects over the two dimensional transverse Brillouin zone. The SBTB parameters for each of the four symmetry bands for bcc Fe(100) are first proposed which are complemented with the transferable tight-binding parameters for the MgO tunnel barrier for the Delta1 and Delta5 bands. The non-equilibrium Green's function formalism is then used to calculate the transport. Features like I-V characteristics, voltage dependence and the barrier width dependence of the tunnel magnetoresistance ratio are captured quantitatively and the trends match well with the ones observed by ab initio methods.