Influence of Roughness and Disorder on Tunneling Magnetoresistance.pdfVIP

Influence of Roughness and Disorder on Tunneling Magnetoresistance P. X. Xu,1 V. M. Karpan,2 K. Xia,1 M. Zwierzycki,2,3 I. Marushchenko,2 and P. J. Kelly2 1Beijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics, Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100080, China 6 2Faculty of Science and Technology and MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology, 0 University of Twente, P.O. Box 217, 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands 0 3 2 Max-Planck-Institut f¨ur Festk¨orperforschung, Heisenbergstr. 1, D-70569 Stuttgart, Germany. (Dated: February 6, 2008) y a A systematic, quantitative study of the effect of interface roughness and disorder on the magne- toresistance of FeCo |vacuum |FeCo magnetic tunnel junctions is presented based upon parameter-free M electronic structure calculations. Surface roughness is found to have a very strong effect on the spin- 0 polarized transport while that of disorder in the leads (leads consisting of a substitutional alloy) is 3 weaker but still sufficient to suppress the huge tunneling magneto-resistance (TMR) predicted for ideal systems. ] l l a Tunneling magnetoresistance (TMR) refers to of FeO at the interface14,15 but the role of interface dis- h- the dependence of the resistance of a FM1 |I |FM2 order has only been speculated upon.16 s (ferromagnet|insulator |ferromagnet) magnetic tunnel Method. In this paper, we use first principles elec- e junction (MTJ) on the relati