A vertical transport geometry for electrical spin injection and extraction in Si

Schottky barriers formed between ferromagnetic metal and Semiconductor are of particular interest for spin injection and detection experiments. Here, we investigate electrical spin polarized carrier injection and extraction in Si using a Co/Si/Ni vertical structure built on a 250 nm thick Si membrane. Current-voltage measurements performed on the devices at low temperatures showed evidence of the conduction being dominated by thermionic field emission, which is believed to be the key to spin injection using Schottky junctions. This, however, proved inconclusive as our devices did not show any magnetoresistance signal even at low temperatures. We attribute this partially to the high resistance-area product in our Schottky contacts at spin injection biases. We show the potential of this vertical spin-device for future experiments by numerical simulation. The results reveal that by growing a thin highly doped Ge layer at the Schottky junctions the resistance-area products could be tuned to obtain high magnetoresistance. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.