Magnetoresistance and spin-transfer torque in magnetic tunnel junctions

By Jonathan Z. Sun, D. Ralph. 2008

177 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We comment on both recent progress and lingering puzzles related to research on magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs). MTJs are already being used in applications such as magnetic-field sensors in the read heads of disk drives, and they may also be the first device geometry in which spin-torque effects are applied to manipulate magnetic dynamics, in order to make non-volatile magnetic random access memory. However, there remain many unanswered questions about such basic properties as the magnetoresistance of MTJs, how their properties change as a function of tunnel-barrier thickness and applied bias, and what are the magnitude and direction of the spin-transfer-torque vector induced by a tunnel current.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Condensed Matter Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c2da1070688a6a4461488020ffee8ee47af35361

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Condensed Matter Physics

Citations in the corpus

Magnetization oscillations and waves driven by pure spin currents (2016, background): “Since the first demonstration [1-5] of the possibility to excite magnetization dynamics by spin-polarized electric currents due to the spin transfer torque (STT) effect [6,7], dynamic spin torque phenomena have become the subject of intense research [8-15].”
Spin-Torque and Spin-Hall Nano-Oscillators (2015, methodology): “Equipped with two different techniques for generating spin currents, we now briefly explain how spin currents can generate STT and control the magnetic states and the magnetodynamics of nanomagnets and magnetic thin films (for an in-depth review of STT, see [43] and [44]).”
Basic principles of STT-MRAM cell operation in memory arrays (2013, background): “In the case of inelastic tunnelling in a symmetric junction with polarization P , the STT efficiency η is predicted to be [51, 53]”
Electric-field-assisted switching in magnetic tunnel junctions. (2012, background): “, which could possibly provide a more energy-efficient route to manipulate the magnetization in MTJs when compared with the spin transfer torque (STT) effec”