1

1.1

Spintronics
Background

Spintronics possibly derives its name from spin and electronics. In electronics one achieves the task of data storage, processing or extraction by manipulating electronic charges, while in the case of spintronics one manipulates spins. One way to manipulate the spins is to align them in a reference magnetic eld and devices operate by measuring a quantity (e.g. current) that changes in a predictable way to the spin alignment. Indeed spintronics is a general name used for the technology that depends on spin rather than charge manipulation and thus the eld is diverse and interests can vary. Depending on the eld of application, one may be interested in the methods/theories of spin injection (i.e. creation of a spin polarized current/population in a medium), spin transport (i.e. properties of spin currents across a medium) or spin relaxation time (i.e. roughly speaking the time-scale over which a single spin or a population of spins loses its original state).

1.2

Junctions

Traditional forms of manipulation of spins come in the form of GMR junction, whose operations depend on the concept of magnetoresistance. Basically it is a device in which a non-ferromagnetic material is sandwiched between two ferromagetic materials. The resistance of the device can change in response to the relative polarizations of the two sandwiching ferromagnetic materials. Along a (possibly) dierent vein, a person may be interested in the spinpolarized current obtained when a ferromagnet is connected to a non-ferromagnetic materials. The principle is basically that in a ferromagnet the current is polarized and one naively expects that the current ow may carry the spins into the non-ferromagnetic region, which under normal circumstances does not support a spin-polarized current. Until now many type of junctions have been studied experimentally, like F/N, F/N/F, F/I/F and F/I/S, where F, N, I, S stand for ferromagnetic, non-ferromagnetic, insulating and superconductive materials respectively. In junctions having an insulator in between, the current comes about through tunnelling (i.e. the insulator acts as a tunnelling barrier). The calculation of tunnelling current was given in [1]. Basically one treats the case as a transmission problem with simplied boundary conditions at the interfaces and phenomenological tunnelling matrix elements (or in other words the probability that a particular state on the left will tunnel through the insulating barrier to another state on the right). Even without a full understanding of the theories behind the calculations, one may expect that accurate numerical calculations of quantities require acceptable models describing charge carriers in the individual solids and a proper understanding of interfacial behaviours where the two solids join.

1.3

Spin Transport

In a classical setting, transport means movement from one point to another (possibly under an external cause). In general one is interested how a quantity changes under the movement. For example, one may ask what is the probability

for a pool of spin-polarized particles at point A to retain its spin polarization at point B? To study this kind of questions it is necessary to nd out the couplings between dierent polarization states within the Hamiltonian. For example, there may be spin-ip interactions with magnetic impurities. Also, spin-orbit coupling eectively couples dierent spin polarization states. Considerations of dierent mechanisms will lead to dierent relaxation time scales. One also sees from this preliminary look that the conclusions drawn may be material-dependent, unless a given mechanism is shown to dominate in all materials.

1.4

Directions

Since spintronics is a broad and diverse eld, it may be dicult at this stage to set out a well-dened research goal. Instead of stating the strategies towards achieving a well-dened research goal, I would like to have the following questions answered in my PhD study: 1. What are the prospective devices for future spintronics applications? 2. What properties of these devices interest people and do they demand theoretical explanations? 3. Is it possible to incorporate more accurate models in spin transport calculations? 4. Is it possible/necessary to adopt the formalism of many-body calculations in spin transport calculations? 5. How signicantly do interfacial properties aect the calculations?

References
[1] I. Giaever and K. Megerle, Phys. Rev. 122, 1101 (1961).