2007/10/10 by L. Brey, H. A. Fertig · 1 citation
Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Memory and Neural Computing #Graphene research and applications #Quantum and electron transport phenomena #cond-mat.mes-hall #cond-mat.mtrl-sci
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevb.76.205435
published as Physical Review B {\bf 76}, 205435 (2007) · 10 pages
arxiv created 2007/10/10 · openalex publication_date 2007/11/26 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We study the magnetoresistance of spin-valve devices using graphene as a nonmagnetic material to connect ferromagnetic leads. As a preliminary step, we first study the conductivity of a graphene strip connected to metallic contacts for a variety of lead parameters and demonstrate that the resulting conductivity is rather insensitive to them. We then compute the conductivity of the spin-valve device in the parallel and antiparallel spin polarization configurations and find that it depends only weakly on the relative spin orientations of the leads, so that the magnetoresistance (MR) of the system is very small. The smallness of MR is a consequence of the near independence of the graphene conductivity from the electronic details of the leads. Our results indicate that, although graphene has properties that make it attractive for spintronic devices, the performance of a graphene-based spin-valve is likely to be poor.