Giant magnetoresistance in lateral metallic nanostructures for spintronic applications

In this letter, we discuss the shift observed in spintronics from the current-perpendicular-to-plane geometry towards lateral geometries, illustrating the new opportunities offered by this configuration. Using CoFe-based all-metallic LSVs, we show that giant magnetoresistance variations of more than 10% can be obtained, competitive with the current-perpendicular-to-plane giant magnetoresistance. We then focus on the interest of being able to tailor freely the geometries. On the one hand, by tailoring the non-magnetic parts, we show that it is possible to enhance the spin signal of giant magnetoresistance structures. On the other hand, we show that tailoring the geometry of lateral structures allows creating a multilevel memory with high spin signals, by controlling the coercivity and shape anisotropy of the magnetic parts. Furthermore, we study a new device in which the magnetization direction of a nanodisk can be detected. We thus show that the ability to control the magnetic properties can be used to take advantage of all the spin degrees of freedom, which are usually occulted in current-perpendicular-to-plane devices. This flexibility of lateral structures relatively to current-perpendicular-to-plane structures is thus found to offer a new playground for the development of spintronic applications.