Analysis of current-voltage characteristics of GaAs/MgO/Fe junction

Abstract

Effective spin injection from ferromagnetic metal into semiconductors is essential for the development of spintronics devices. Utilization of effective tunnel barrier helps to overcome the intrinsic conductance mismatch between metal and semiconductor, which is a major source of low electrical spin injection [1, 2]. The GaAs/MgO/Fe structure is a strong candidates for the spin injection/detection structure with spin filtering effect. This structure is quite attractive since it can be epitaxially prepared, and especially MgO/Fe structure forms a basic part of Fe(Co)/MgO/Fe(Co) magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) structure with giant tunneling magnetoresistance (TMR). In this work, we report on the study of current-voltage (I-V) characteristics of the structure, which is important to understand the bias dependent spin filtering phenomena.