Contact induced spin relaxation in Hanle spin precession measurements

TL;DR

This paper investigates how contact-induced spin relaxation affects Hanle spin precession measurements in spintronics, revealing significant distortions in extracted spin transport parameters and proposing guidelines for accurate data analysis.

Contribution

It provides a quantitative analysis of contact-induced spin relaxation effects on Hanle measurements and offers improved fitting procedures for reliable spin transport property extraction.

Findings

Contact effects can mimic a 10,000-fold decrease in spin relaxation time.

The diffusion coefficient is minimally affected, increasing by less than a factor of 2.

Proper fitting guidelines enable accurate determination of spin transport properties.

Abstract

In the field of spintronics the "conductivity mismatch" problem remains an important issue. Here the difference between the resistance of ferromagnetic electrodes and a (high resistive) transport channel causes injected spins to be backscattered into the leads and to lose their spin information. We study the effect of the resulting contact induced spin relaxation on spin transport, in particular on non-local Hanle precession measurements. As the Hanle line shape is modified by the contact induced effects, the fits to Hanle curves can result in incorrectly determined spin transport properties of the transport channel. We quantify this effect that mimics a decrease of the spin relaxation time of the channel reaching more than 4 orders of magnitude and a minor increase of the diffusion coefficient by less than a factor of 2. Then we compare the results to spin transport measurements on graphene from the literature. We further point out guidelines for a Hanle precession fitting procedure that allows to reliably extract spin transport properties from measurements.