A carbon based spintronic material Fe(x)-C(1-x)/Si structure

The decay of spin polarization poses serious problems for spintronic devices. It will be greatly helped by the availability of spintronic materials with a long spin diffusion length. Carbon has small spin-orbital interaction and longer coherent length. This makes carbon suitable material for exploitation in the spintronic materials and devices. A great deal of magnetoresistance (MR) research has been carried out in carbon nanotubes, grapheme and small carbon molecules. However, the MRs of these materials are normally observed at low temperature, making these carbon materials difficult used in information industry. In this paper, we introduce a novel class of carbon based hybrid materials Fe(x)-C(1-x)/Si structure which show larger MR at room temperature. These materials have also some other novel physical properties, such as electromagnetoresistance, switch effect, pressure sensitivity, gas sensitivity and photoconductivity. This kind of carbon based materials has shown early sign of being excellent candidates for spintronic materials operating at room temperature.