Introduction to Spintronics and Spin LEDs

Arnab Bose(124070018) Dept. of Electrical Engineering, IIT-B

Overview of this presentation

Why Spintronics?
Fundamental Physical Limitation of Modern Technology Alternatives like Single Electron Transistor, Organic Semiconductor, Spintronic Devices Spin is the Extra dimension other than Chage which can be controlled Aiming more packing density, lesser power consumption and more operation speed and so on. Basics of Spintronics is Spin injection, Spin transfer and Spin detection

Spin Injection:
1) Optical Injection 2) DMS Aligner 3) Half Metals 4) Ferro magnets

1) From Circular Polarised light ( Optical Injection)

Conservation of Angular Momentum

Angular momentum of Photons & for electrons

2) Injection from Ferromagnetic Sources:

Unpaired electrons in d orbital
Spin Bands are asymmetrical Degree of Spin polarization is defined by : S,X=
+

Fig-1 Its advantage is high Curie Temperature, large saturation of magnetization ,low coercivities and well developed fabrication technology.
Disadvantage: conductivity mismatch problem. Solution : Rashbas tunnel barrier & Schottky reversed biased tunnelling.

3) Injection from DMS (Diluted Magnetic Semiconductor)

Advantage: Lesser conductivity mismatch problem Ex: II-Mn-VI kind of paramagnetic materials like CdMnTe, ZnMnSe, .
Under presence of applied H field they have conduction band (Zeeman) splitting with interaction of sp-d orbitals with localised Mn+ ions. When unpolarised current is passed from non-magnetic materials to this DMS, injected electrons are quickly scattered in lower spin sub bands and as a result they become spin polarised along the direction of the magnetic field. And then after they can be drifted or diffused to the semiconductor

3) Injection from Half-Metals

Due to the ferromagnetic decoupling in half-metallic ferromagnets, one of the spin subbands generally either the majority spin or spin-up sub-band exhibits a metallic density of states ideally 100% injection efficiency. It is the density of state orientation that determines the orientation of spin not the mobility of the different spin oriented electrons.

Heusler half metal Shows large magnetoresistance effect in tunnel junction at room temperature. Few like Fe3Si, Co2MnGa, Co2MnSi have very high Curie temperature and excellent lattice match with GaAs

Spin transport
Drift or diffusion. Spin life time Relaxation process

EY(ElliottYafet) recombination ( It dominates in small-gap and large spinorbit coupling semiconductors and it is the primary reason for spin relaxation in semiconductor) DP (DyakonovPerel) recombination (it dominates in middle-gap materials and at high temperatures for systems with sufficiently low hole densities),Materials lacking Inversion Symmetry,Ex:GaAs BAP(BirAronovPikus) recombination (It dominates in p+-doped semiconductors at lower temperatures.
Hyperfine Interaction Mechanism in which magnetic interaction between electrons & nuclei resulting spin decoherence of confined electrons in QW.

Spin Detection
1) Optical Detection 2) Spin Hall Effect 3) Magnetoresistance.

Spin Optical Detection

Rate of transition: Rif =
2

|Mif|2 ()

Where Mif = < f |HI | i > , HI = E

Condition of transition: m= 1 or 0, & l= 1

Conduction Band | 1/2 , >

Transition

Heavy Hole | 3/2 , 3/2 >

Light Hole | 3/2, >

mj Emission | Mif |2

Matrix element Mif = < f |H| i>

CB HH
CB HH CB LH CB LH

< 3/2, +3/2 || 1/2,+ >

< 3/2, -3/2 || 1/2, - > < 3/2, +3/2 || 1/2, - > < 3/2, -3/2 || 1/2,+ >

-1
+1 -1 +1

+
+ -

|< px| | px >|2

|< px| | px >|2 1/6|< px| | px >|2 1/6|< px| | px >|2

Optical Selection
Optical selection rules are application at point.

inj=

nn n+n

CB HH, CB HH are 3 times more probable than CB LH, CB LH transition. + I( ) I( ) (3n +n)(3n+n) inj CP = I + + I() = 3n +n +(3n+n) =- 2

For QW & QD due to strain degeneracy in HH & LH bands are removed & we neglect transition in to LH from CB

CP = I

I( ) I( ) + + I( )

3n+3n = - inj
Fig-3

3n3n

Device Band Structure

Active well QW or QD Confinement in Spatial Co-ordinate More Spin life time for QD than QW. Spin relaxation time() is more for Homovalent QW than Heterovalent QW. QD less sensitive to Temperature than QW, in which Spin polarization decrease with same range of temperature. For wider QW T-2 ,in narrow QWs(<10nm), weakly temperature dependent.
Effective band gap of QW is much smaller than the band gap of any layer in heterostructure.So released photons energy is effectively lesser than the other part of the band gap & so less chance of (MCD) reabsorption of photons.

Device Geometry

Fig-2: spin-LED under the (a) Faraday, (b) quasi-Voigt and (c) oblique Hanle effect geometries

Faraday Geometry:

1) It is most commonly used geometry and selection rules are well understood.

2) H is parallel to direction of propagation of light and surface normal or growth direction. 3) Its disadvantage is that due to its shape anisotropy very large magnetic field is required.

Quasi-Voigt geometry
It is less commonly used and it is used to characterise edge emitting LEDs.
H and direction propagating photons are parallel and they are perpendicular to the growth direction.

Faradays selection rules are no longer valid here. Photon reabsorption through the aligner is lesser as photons does not pass through it.
Competitively lesser H required here and so for small band gap semiconductor material where electronics properties are affected with large magnetic field this geometry is suitable.

Ambiguity regarding Spin detection

Ideally we should have placed Spin Aligner directly adjacent to then QW or WDs. But to reduce the diffusion of magnetic impurities inside active region we need to place spacer of few Angstrom range. When large H is applied degenerate bands get spitted (Zeeman Effect) and hence carrier density may attain net spin polarization which does not have any relation with the injected spin from Aligner.

Conclusion

Spin LEDs, LASERs can be used in secured optical communication, cryptography, quantum computing and many more. Still it is challenging to build efficient Spin LEDs for room temperature operation.

References:
1)Fig 1 from Phd dissertation on FERROMAGNET/SEMICONDUCTOR BASED
SPINTRONIC DEVICES by Prof. Dipankar Saha 2) Fig-2 & Fig-3 from TOPICAL REVIEW Spin-polarized light-emitting diodes and lasers by M Holub and P Bhattacharya, J. Phys. D: Appl. Phys. 40 (2007) R179 R203
3) Spintronics: Fundamentals and applications by Igor Zutic, Jaroslav Fabian, S. Das Sarma from arXiv:cond-mat/0405528v1 [cond-mat.other] 21 May 2004 4) acta physica slovaca vol. 57 No. 4 & 5, 565 907 5) Spintronics: A Spin-Based Electronics Vision for the Future, S. AScience 294, 1488 (2001). Wolf et al., DOI: 10.1126/science.1065389