Electrical Detection of Spin Excitations

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to draw attention to a possible new approach for measuring the spin excitation spectrum of a spin array by placing it in intimate contact with the channel of a spin-valve device in an anti-parallel (AP) configuration. We show, using realistic device parameters, that the second derivative of the current $\partial^2I/\partial V^2$ should exhibit peaks whose location corresponds to the energy of excitation and whose height is its strength. The effect is maximum for ideal half metallic contacts in AP configuration but we show that even with contacts that are less than ideal, the spin signals can be extracted using a de-embedding scheme. Compared to existing techniques our proposal has three attractive features: (a) high sensitivity down to single spins, (b) high spatial resolution limited only by the wavefunctions of the individual spins and (c) a relatively common device structure to which a lot of current research is devoted