Enhanced magnetoresistance in lateral spin-valves.

The effect of feature sizes on the characteristics of lateral spintronic devices have been investigated experimentally and theoretically. It is demonstrated that confining spin-transport in the active region of a device enhances magnitude of the spin-dependent response substantially. Numerical simulation of spin-transport corroborates the experimental observations. Device characteristics are found to be a strong function of spin-polarizer and analyzer dimensions. The response is observed to attain a peak value for an optimum device feature size, and this is seen to be a function of temperature. Spin dependent effects become weaker for very small and very large devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]