Title of dissertation: SPIN INJECTION AND DETECTION IN COPPER SPIN VALVE STRUCTURES Samir Garzón, Doctor of Philosophy, 2005 Dissertation directed by: Richard A. Webb Department of Physics We report measurements of spin injection and detection in a mesoscopic copper wire from which the electron spin relaxation time and the spin current polarization in copper can be found. Spin injection is real...

We review progress on the spintronics proposal for quantum computing where the quantum bits (qubits) are implemented with electron spins. We calculate the exchange interaction of coupled quantum dots and present experiments, where the exchange coupling is measured via transport. Then, experiments on single spins on dots are described, where long spin relaxation times, on the order of a millisec...

Electronic carriers in graphene show a high carrier mobility at room temperature. Thus, this system is widely viewed as a potential future charge-based high-speed electronic material to complement-or replace-silicon. At the same time, the spin properties of graphene have suggested improved capability for spin-based electronics or spintronics and spin-based quantum computing. As a result, the de...

Citation Abanin, D. A. et al. " Nonlocal charge transport mediated by spin diffusion in the spin Hall effect regime. Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use. The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters...

No s prop The different conventions used in the semiconductor and magnetic metals communities can cause confusion in the context of spin polarization and transport in simple heterostructures. In semiconductors, terminology is based on the orientation of the electron spin, while in magnetic metals it is based on the orientation of the moment. In the rapidly expanding field of spintronics, where ...

Efforts to implement semiconductor-based spintronic devices have been crippled by the lack of an efficient and practical means to electrically inject spin-polarized carriers into a semiconductor heterostructure. Spin injection from semimagnetic semiconductor contacts (ZnMnSe/AlGaAs/GaAs) has produced electron spin polarizations of ~ 85% in the GaAs QW [1]. Several factors potentially limit spin...

We predict a spin echo in electron transport through layered ferromagnetic-normal-ferromagnetic metal structures: whereas a spin current polarized perpendicular to the magnetization direction decays when traversing a single homogeneous ferromagnet on the scale of the ferromagnetic spin-coherence length, it partially reappears by adding a second identical but antiparallel ferromagnet. This reent...

We study the linear response spin Hall conductivity of a two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) in the presence of the Rashba spin-orbit interaction in the diffusive transport regime. When defect scattering is modeled by isotropic short-range potential scatterers the spin Hall conductivity vanishes due to the vertex correction. A nonvanishing spin Hall effect may be recovered for dominantly forwar...

Engineered heterostructures designed for electric control of magnetic properties, the so-called magnetoelectric interfaces, present a novel route towards using the spin degree of freedom in electronic devices. Here, we review how a subset of such interfaces, namely ferromagnet-ferroelectric heterostructures, display electronically mediated control of magnetism and, in particular, emphasis is pl...

The Monte Carlo approach is utilized to study spinpolarized electron transport in spintronic device structures. Evolution of the electron spin polarization vector is controlled by the spin-orbit interaction. Spin polarization properties, including the spin-dephasing length and orientation of the polarization vector, are investigated, for the applied voltage from 0.05V to 0.25V, and for temperat...