Oxide spintronics

TL;DR

This paper reviews the development and key results in oxide spintronics, highlighting advances in materials physics and spin-dependent transport, and discusses future prospects for next-generation devices.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of oxide spintronics, emphasizing recent materials and phenomena, and offers perspectives on future applications in spintronic technology.

Findings

High tunnel magnetoresistance ratios with manganite electrodes

Advances in diluted magnetic oxides and multiferroics

Potential for next-generation spintronics devices

Abstract

Concomitant with the development of metal-based spintronics in the late 1980's and 1990's, important advances were made on the growth of high-quality oxide thin films and heterostructures. While this was at first motivated by the discovery of high-temperature superconductivity in perovskite Cu oxides, this technological breakthrough was soon applied to other transition metal oxides, and notably mixed-valence manganites. The discovery of colossal magnetoresistance in manganite films triggered an intense research activity on these materials, but the first notable impact of magnetic oxides in the field of spintronics was the use of such manganites as electrodes in magnetic tunnel junctions, yielding tunnel magnetoresistance ratios one order of magnitude larger than what had been obtained with transition metal electrodes. Since then, the research on oxide spintronics has been intense with the latest developments focused on diluted magnetic oxides and more recently on multiferroics. In this paper, we will review the most important results on oxide spintronics, emphasizing materials physics as well as spin-dependent transport phenomena, and finally give some perspectives on how the flurry of new magnetic oxides could be useful for next-generation spintronics devices.