Electronic measurement and control of spin transport in silicon
By I. Appelbaum, Biqin Huang, D. Monsma. Nature, 2007
649 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The spin lifetime and diffusion length of electrons are transport parameters that define the scale of coherence in spintronic devices and circuits. As these parameters are many orders of magnitude larger in semiconductors than in metals, semiconductors could be the most suitable for spintronics. So far, spin transport has only been measured in direct-bandgap semiconductors or in combination with magnetic semiconductors, excluding a wide range of non-magnetic semiconductors with indirect bandgaps. Most notable in this group is silicon, Si, which (in addition to its market entrenchment in electronics) has long been predicted a superior semiconductor for spintronics with enhanced lifetime and transport length due to low spin–orbit scattering and lattice inversion symmetry. Despite this promise, a demonstration of coherent spin transport in Si has remained elusive, because most experiments focused on magnetoresistive devices; these methods fail because of a fundamental impedance mismatch between ferromagnetic metal and semiconductor, and measurements are obscured by other magnetoelectronic effects. Here we demonstrate conduction-band spin transport across 10 μm undoped Si in a device that operates by spin-dependent ballistic hot-electron filtering through ferromagnetic thin films for both spin injection and spin detection. As it is not based on magnetoresistance, the hot-electron spin injection and spin detection avoids impedance mismatch issues and prevents interference from parasitic effects. The clean collector current shows independent magnetic and electrical control of spin precession, and thus confirms spin coherent drift in the conduction band of silicon.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/384e2adad00f6bb7c9a228dc5da9c3af37908a43
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Citations in the corpus
- Silicon quantum electronics (2012, background): “Another vast field of research is spin transport (Appelbaum et al., 2007; Dash et al., 2009) and spintronics (Awschalom and Flatté, 2007; Jansen, 2012; Žutić et al., 2004), which we will not discuss in this review.”
- Spin dynamics in semiconductors (2010, methodology): “The solid curve is the calculation (Pseudo), the symbols ar e the spin injection (SI Appelbaum) [150] and the electron spi n resonance (ESR Lepine [763] and ESR Lancaster [771]) data ( see Ref.”
- Electron spin coherence exceeding seconds in high-purity silicon. (2011, background): “3e) in neighbour pairs is the dominant decoherence process at temperatures below 4K: (1) T2 shows no temperature dependence, and (2) T2 scales with the donor density.”
- Electrical spin-injection into silicon from a ferromagnetic metal/tunnel barrier contact (2007, methodology): “Recently published work used a spin-valve transistor structure to inject hot electrons (800 meV, determined by the Schottky barrier) into silicon, in which 1 mA of input current was required to generate 1 nA of spin-polarized current of unstated polarization in the silico”