UC Riverside

Spintronic devices are very promising for future information storage, logic operations and computation and have the potential to replace current CMOS technology approaching the scaling limit. In particular, the generation and manipulation of spin current enables the integration of storage and logic within the same circuit for more powerful computing architectures. In this thesis, we examine the manipulation of spins in 2D materials such as graphene and metal/magnetic insulator heterostructures. In particular, we investigate the feasibility for achieving magnetization switching of a nanomagnet using graphene as a nonmagnetic channel material for All Spin Logic Device applications. Using in-situ MBE deposition of nanomagnet on graphene spin valve, we demonstrate the presence of an interfacial spin dephasing at the interface between the graphene and the nanomagnet. By introducing a Cu spacer between the nanomagnet and graphene, we demonstrate that this interfacial effect is related to an exchange interaction between the spin current and the disordered magnetic moment of the nanomagnet in the first monolayer. In addition to the newly discovered interfacial spin relaxation effect, the extracted contact resistance area product of the nanomagnet/graphene interface is relatively high on the order of 1Ωμm2. In practice, reducing the contact resistance will be as important as eliminating the interfacial relaxation in order to achieve magnetization switching.

Furthermore, we examine spin manipulation in a nonmagnetic Pt using an internal magnetic exchange field produced by the adjacent magnetic insulator CoFe2O4 grown by MBE. Here, we report the observation of a strong magnetic proximity effect of Pt deposited on top of a perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (PMA) inverse spinel material Cobalt Ferrite (CFO, CoFe2O4). The CFO was grown by MBE and its magnetization was characterized by Vibrating Sample Magnetometry (VSM) demonstrating the strong out of plane magnetic anisotropy of this material. The anomalous Hall measurement on a Pt/CFO Hall bar exhibits a strong non-linear background around the saturation of the out of plane CFO magnetization. After subtraction of the Ordinary Hall Effect (OHE), we extract a strongly hysteretic anomalous Hall voltage that indicates that Pt acquired the magnetization properties of the CFO and has become ferromagnetic due to the proximity effects.