Title :
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
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;
Journal_Title :
Magnetics, IEEE Transactions on
DOI :
10.1109/TMAG.2009.2022644
