1. Free-standing magnetic nano-membranes for electron spin-filtering applications
- Author
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Övergaard, T., Wojek, B. M, Leandersson, M., Ohldag, H., Bonetti, S., Wiell, T., and Tjernberg, O.
- Subjects
Condensed Matter - Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics - Abstract
Free-standing ferromagnetic nano-membranes with thicknesses below 10 nm could effectively be used for spin selective filtering of electrons. Such membranes can work both as spin detectors in electron-spectroscopy, -microscopy and -diffraction as well as a source of spin polarized electrons. Theoretical studies and previous work has indicated that ferromagnetic membranes of a few nm have Sherman functions in the 30-60 % range and would provide an effective alternative to current spin detection technology. Here we demonstrate the fabrication of gold capped Co nano-membranes with a 2.6 nm Co layer and a total thickness below 10 nm. The membranes have a Sherman function $S\approx 0.41$ and a transmission of $3.7\times 10^{-2}$ for electron energies of 2 eV. The integration of such spin-filtering membranes in a hemispherical electron analyzer is shown to provide massively parallel detection capabilities and a "2-dimensional" figure of merit $FOM_\mathrm{2D}$ = 67.2, the highest reported to date., Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures + 6 pages, 6 figures supplementary information
- Published
- 2017