Letter abstract
Nature Materials 3, 862 - 867 (2004)
doi:10.1038/nmat1256
Subject Categories: Electronic materials | Magnetic materials | Surface and thin films
Giant tunnelling magnetoresistance at room temperature with MgO (100) tunnel barriers
Stuart S. P. Parkin1, Christian Kaiser1, Alex Panchula1, Philip M. Rice1, Brian Hughes2, Mahesh Samant1 and See-Hun Yang1
Magnetically engineered magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs) show promise as non-volatile storage cells in high-performance solid-state magnetic random access memories (MRAM)1. The performance of these devices is currently limited by the modest (<
70%) room-temperature tunnelling magnetoresistance (TMR) of technologically relevant MTJs. Much higher TMR values have been theoretically predicted for perfectly ordered (100) oriented single-crystalline Fe/MgO/Fe MTJs. Here we show that sputter-deposited polycrystalline MTJs grown on an amorphous underlayer, but with highly oriented (100) MgO tunnel barriers and CoFe electrodes, exhibit TMR values of up to 220% at room temperature and 300% at low temperatures. Consistent with these high TMR values, superconducting tunnelling spectroscopy experiments indicate that the tunnelling current has a very high spin polarization of 85%, which rivals that previously observed only using half-metallic ferromagnets2. Such high values of spin polarization and TMR in readily manufactureable and highly thermally stable devices (up to 400 °C) will accelerate the development of new families of spintronic devices.
- IBM Research Division, IBM Almaden Research Center, IBM-Infineon MRAM Development Alliance, 650 Harry Road, San Jose, California 95120, USA
- Infineon Technologies, IBM Almaden Research Center, IBM-Infineon MRAM Development Alliance, 650 Harry Road, San Jose, California 95120, USA
Correspondence to: Stuart S. P. Parkin1 e-mail: parkin@almaden.ibm.com
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