Effect of Interfacial Scattering on Resonance Peaks in Conductance Spectra of Metal/ferromagnet/metal Heterostructures

Abstract

The tunneling conductance spectra of a metal/ferromagnet/metal (M/FM/M) double junction system were theoretically studied based on a scattering approach in a ballistic regime. At the first and second interfaces, the scattering potentials, spin-flip and non-spin-flip scattering, were set to be distinguishable. It was found that the resonance peaks could reach a maximum value when the non-spin-flip scattering at both interfaces were approximately equal in magnitude. This supports why researchers have modeled these two potentials as the same in previous calculations. When the spin-flip scattering at the interfaces is present, the resonance peaks of the conductance spectra split in the region of the energy are larger than those at the bottom of the minority band of the ferromagnet. This kind of scattering mostly suppresses those resonance peaks. However, all the above effects strongly depend on electron energy in the dispersion.