Towards all-electrical spin injection and detection in GaAs

We discuss our approach to realizing all-electrical spin injection and detection in GaAs via ferromagnetic metals and oxide tunnel barriers. A critical requirement is suppression of the formed Schottky barrier, which causes conductivity mismatching and prevents detection in reverse bias. However, initial I-V measurements of engineered GaAs/AlOx /CoFe tunnel contacts still show too high resistance area products in comparison to the semiconductor conductance, due to a large Schottky barrier contribution. To this end, optimized doping levels of the tunnel contacts and semiconductor spin transport region are calculated. Secondly, control over the magnetic properties of injector and detector electrode is established by designing both electrodes to have different switching fields, due to different widths.