Layered Magnetic Semiconductors for Spin-torque memristor
- Reference number
- IS14-0021
- Start and end dates
- 150101-181231
- Amount granted
- 1 875 000 SEK
- Administrative organization
- Uppsala University
- Research area
- Materials Science and Technology
Summary
We propose a spin memristor system of Ni/NiO-ZnO/Ni magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs) with NiO ZnO nano composite barrier layers, which can simultaneously show large memristance and magnetoresistance due to the metal-insulator transition of Ni1−xO and ZnO1−y layers controlled by the migration of Ni and O vacancies between Ni1−xO and ZnO1−y. The spin memristor system: 1.A very thin compact NiO insulating layer will be formed as tunneling barrier by depositing a very thin ZnO layer onto the bottom Ni layer, and the ZnO layer acts as a reservoir of O vacancies for the electrical switching of NiO under applied electrical field. 2.The insulating antiferromagnetic NiO layer can supply an exchange bias field on its bottom Ni layer, which can be used to control the magnetization reversal of the bottom Ni layer to realize the spin-dependent function of the devices, such as tunneling magnetoresistance. The main thrust in this proposal is to integrate a highly accurate theoretical instrument with the state of the art materials science techniques for a healthy cross-fertilization between the theory and experiments. This will be done by forming a collaboration between experimental work at Dongguk and theoretical work at Uppsala. The gained knowledge will be applied to design prototype spin memristor devices. Cross-linkage between Sweden and the Korea will be built concerning the exchange of staff, postdocs and Ph.D. students and continued research planning.
Popular science description
Korean side (KS) wil conduct experimental and Swedish side(SS) theoretical study of the new class electrical component - spin memristor, based on multylayer magnetic tunneling junction. In this collaboration KS will compliment SS with measurement and manufacturing of the junctions, and SS will compliment KS with computational modeling and theoretical optimization of the materials and geometries of the devices. The involvement of the KS and SS groups into research for nanoscale electronics will allow the both direct transfer of the aquired knowledge into corresponding KS/SS research community and dissimilation of the findings throug high ranked publications. The outcome of this collaboration will therefore be twofold: from education side, experimentalists will benifit from lerning theory and matrial theorists will benifit from working on applyed project. From the practical side, the prototype spin memristor devices will be built for checking the technical performance of the ferromagnetic thin films and multilayers.