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Magnetic Scanning Tunneling Microscopy with a Two-Terminal Non-Magnetic Tip: Quantitative Results

T. P. Pareek, Patrick Bruno

cond-mat.mes-hallarXiv:cond-mat/0012252

Abstract

We report numerical simulation result of a recently proposed \P. Bruno, Phys. Rev. Lett 79, 4593, (1997)\ approach to perform magnetic scanning tunneling microscopy with a two terminal non-magnetic tip. It is based upon the spin asymmetry effect of the tunneling current between a ferromagnetic surface and a two-terminal non-magnetic tip. The spin asymmetry effect is due to the spin-orbit scattering in the tip. The effect can be viewed as a Mott scattering of tunneling electrons within the tip. To obtain quantitative results we perform numerical simulation within the single band tight binding model, using recursive Green function method and Landauer-Büttiker formula for conductance. A new model has been developed to take into account the spin-orbit scattering off the impurities within the single-band tight-binding model. We show that the spin-asymmetry effect is most prominent when the device is in quasi-ballistic regime and the typical value of spin asymmetry is about 5%.

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