Progress toward electrical injection of spin-polarized electrons into semiconductors

The use of carrier spin as a new degree-of-freedom in semiconductor devices offers new functionality and performance. However, efforts to implement semiconductor spintronics have been crippled by the lack of an efficient and practical means to electrically inject spin polarized carriers into a semiconductor device heterostructure. This paper summarizes progress toward that end using magnetic semiconductors and ferromagnetic metals as spin injecting contacts. We describe a very successful approach which employs a ferromagnetic metal/tunnel barrier contact, where the tunnel barrier is simply a tailored Schottky barrier which forms naturally between the ferromagnetic metal and the semiconductor itself. Initial efforts have demonstrated electron spin polarizations of at least 32% in GaAs quantum-well LED heterostructures. Significantly higher spin injection efficiencies are anticipated in optimized structures. These results demonstrate that spin injecting contacts can be formed using a very familiar and widely employed contact methodology, providing a ready pathway for the integration of spin transport into semiconductor processing.