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Interface, volume, and thermal attenuation of hot-electron spins in Ni80Fe20 and Co
R Vlutters1, O M J van't Erve, S D Kim
1Systems and Materials for Information Storage Group, MESA+ Research Institute, University of Twente, 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands.
Abstract:
The relative importance of interface, volume, and thermal scattering in spin-dependent hot-electron transmission of magnetic trilayers is quantified. While interfaces produce significant attenuation (factor 2.2 per interface), the spin asymmetry is dominated by volume scattering. Extracted thermal attenuation lengths (130 A at 300 K for Ni80Fe20) show that thermal spin-wave scattering is stronger than hitherto assumed. This suggests that spontaneous spin-wave emission, rather than the details of the spin-dependent band structure, may cause the strong filtering of minority hot-electron spins.