Perpendicular giant magnetoresistance in Fe/Cr nanowires

We present theoretical studies on the size dependence of the current perpendicular-to-the-plane ballistic conductance and giant magnetoresistance (GMR) in Fe/Cr nanowires within a realistic tight-binding model. We find that the conductance of the minority channel in the parallel configuration increases very slowly with the nanowire size. At the same time, the conductance of all other channels reaches the value observed in Fe/Cr multilayers at very small nanowire size. This limits the GMR ratio to only a fraction of the multilayer value for small nanowires. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.