Giant oscillatory tunnel magnetoresistance in CoFe/MgO/CoFe(001) junctions

TL;DR

This study reports record-high room-temperature TMR ratios up to 631% in CoFe/MgO/CoFe(001) junctions, revealing giant oscillatory behavior and challenging existing tunneling theories, with implications for advanced spintronic devices.

Contribution

Demonstrated unprecedented room-temperature TMR ratios and uncovered oscillatory tunneling phenomena in epitaxial MTJs, prompting a reevaluation of the TMR mechanism.

Findings

TMR ratios up to 631% at room temperature

Oscillatory TMR behavior with 0.32 nm period in MgO thickness

TMR and oscillations persist under bias voltages

Abstract

The tunnel magnetoresistance (TMR) effect observed in magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs) is commonly used in many spintronic applications because the effect can easily convert from local magnetic states to electric signals in a wide range of device resistances. In this study, we demonstrated TMR ratios of up to 631% at room temperature (RT), which is two or more times larger than those used currently for magnetoresistive random access memory (MRAM) devices, using CoFe/MgO/CoFe(001) epitaxial MTJs. The TMR ratio increased up to 1143% at 10 K, which corresponds to an effective tunneling spin polarization of 0.923. The observed large TMR ratios resulted from the fine-tuning of atomic-scale structures of the MTJs, such as crystallographic orientations and MgO interface oxidation, in which the well-known Delta1 coherent tunneling mechanism for the giant TMR effect is expected to be pronounced. However, behavior that is not covered by the standard coherent tunneling theory was unexpectedly manifested; i.e., (i) TMR saturation at a thick MgO barrier region and (ii) enhanced TMR oscillation with a 0.32 nm period in MgO thickness. Particularly, the TMR oscillatory behavior dominates the transport in a wide range of MgO thicknesses; the peak-to-valley difference of the TMR oscillation exceeded 140% at RT, attributable to the appearance of large oscillatory components in resistance area product (RA). Further, we found that the oscillatory behaviors of the TMR ratio and RA survive, even under a +-1 V bias voltage application, indicating the robustness of the oscillation. Our demonstration of the giant RT-TMR ratio will be an essential step for establishing spintronic architectures, such as large-capacity MRAMs and spintronic artificial neural networks. More essentially, the present observations can trigger us to revisit the true TMR mechanism in crystalline MTJs.