News

  A paper entitled "MgGa₂O₄ spinel barrier for magnetic tunnel junctions: coherent tunneling and low barrier height" published in Applied Physics Letters by Dr. Hiroaki Sukegawa, a senior researcher in Spintronics Group, et al. has been selected as AIP journal highlights and news released in "AIP Publishing in the News" by American Institute of Physics.

News:

"Spintronic Technology Advances with Newly Designed Magnetic Tunnel Junctions"
https://publishing.aip.org/publishing/journal-highlights/spintronic-technology-advances-newly-designed-magnetic-tunnel

Paper:

"MgGa₂O₄ spinel barrier for magnetic tunnel junctions: coherent tunneling and low barrier height"
http://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.4977946
Hiroaki Sukegawa, Yushi Kato, Mohamed Belmoubarik, P.-H. Cheng, Tadaomi Daibou, Naoharu Shimomura, Yuuzo Kamiguchi, Junichi Ito, Hiroaki Yoda, Tadakatsu Ohkubo, Seiji Mitani and Kazuhiro Hono, Appl. Phys. Lett. 110, 122404 (2017).

  This paper reports a new material development for a magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) device, which is an element whose electric resistance changes with an external magnetic field. An MTJ is utilized in hard disk drives and magnetic memory devices (so called MRAMs). The developed material is “MgGa₂O₄” which is known as a wide-gap semiconductor spinel oxide, and we succeeded in applying it to a tunnel barrier, the core part of an MTJ, as an alternative material of conventional insulators such as MgO. By using the low band-gap MgGa₂O₄ material, we successfully demonstrated significant reduction in device resistance of MTJs, which is favorable for MTJ applications of high-density hard disk drives and magnetic memories. This work was partly supported by the ImPACT Program of Council for Science, Technology and Innovation, Japan.