Recent advances in organic spin-valve devices

Organic Spintronics has been considered to be the physics and applications of spin polarized electron injection, transport, manipulation and detection in organic diodes by the application of an external magnetic field. The prototype device is the organic spin-valve (OSV), which is based on an organic semiconductor spacer placed in between two ferromagnetic electrodes having different coercive fields, of which magnetoresistance changes with the applied field. Immense progress has been achieved in the past few years in fabricating, studying and understanding the underlying physics of these devices. We highlight the most significant advance in OSV research at the University of Utah, including the magnetoresistance response temperature and bias voltage dependencies: and show significant room temperature operation using LSMO/C-60/Co structure. We also report positive OSV-related magnetoresistance at low temperature, which was achieved using LSMO/polymer/CoOSV structure, where the polymer is a poly[phenylene-vinylene] derivative. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.