MgO-Based Epitaxial Magnetic Tunnel Junctions Using Fe-V Electrodes

Author

Bonell, Frédéric ; Andrieu, Stéphane ; Bertran, François ; Lefèvre, Patrick ; Ibrahimi, Amina Taleb ; Snoeck, Etienne ; Tiusan, Coriolan-Viorel ; Montaigne, François

Author_Institution

Inst. Jean Lamour, Univ. H. Poincare, Nancy, France

Volume

45

Issue

10

fYear

2009

Firstpage

3467

Lastpage

3471

Abstract

To examine the influence of the barrier quality in fully epitaxial Fe/MgO/Fe(001) magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs), we propose to use Fe-V alloys as magnetic electrodes. This leads to a reduced misfit with MgO. We actually observe, by high-resolution electron microscopy (HREM) and local strain measurements, that the misfit dislocations density in the MgO barrier is lower when it is grown on Fe-V(001). This improvement of the crystalline quality of the MgO barrier actually leads to a significant increase of the tunnel magneto-resistance (TMR), despite the loss of spin polarization (SP) in these alloys, which was measured by spin-polarized X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (SR-XPS).

Keywords

X-ray photoelectron spectra; dislocation density; electrodes; iron; iron alloys; magnesium compounds; magnetic epitaxial layers; magnetic multilayers; spin polarised transport; transmission electron microscopy; tunnelling magnetoresistance; vanadium alloys; Fe-MgO-FeV; HRTEM; SR-XPS; TMR; crystalline quality; epitaxial magnetic tunnel junctions; high-resolution electron microscopy; local strain; magnetic electrodes; misfit dislocation density; multilayers; spin-polarized X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy; tunnel magnetoresistance; Dislocation; Fe-V alloy; MgO; epitaxial magnetic tunnel junction; spin polarization;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Magnetics, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9464

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/TMAG.2009.2022644

Filename

5257273