The influence of defects on electrical transport in magnetic multilayers

The transmission matrix approach was used to evaluate the perpendicular magnetotransport in metallic multilayers on an abinitio level. The spin-polarized, surface Green function technique was employed within the framework of the tight-binding, linear muffin-tin orbital method. The effect of impurities was included in terms of lateral supercells with random arrangements of two types of atoms. This approach treats both the ballistic and the diffusive regimes of magnetotransport on equal footing. The method was also applied to face-centered-cubic-based Co/Cu/Co(001) trilayers.