Research Papers in Physics and Astronomy
Date of this Version
2004
Document Type
Article
Citation
Journal of Magnetism and Magnetic Materials 272–276 (2004) 1954–1955
Abstract
Transmission through a sufficiently thick vacuum barrier is factorized in the product of two ‘‘surface transmission functions’’ and a vacuum decay factor. Based on this factorization, we study the spin polarization of the tunneling current from clean and oxidized (1 1 1) FCC Co surfaces through vacuum into Al. The conductance is calculated using the principal-layer Green’s function approach within the tight-binding LMTO scheme. We find that for typical vacuum barrier thicknesses the tunneling current from the clean surface is dominated by minority-spin electrons. A monolayer of oxygen on top of the surface completely changes the shape of kll-resolved transmission and makes the tunneling current almost 100% majority-spin polarized.
Comments
U.S. Government Work