Giant magnetoresistance

Giant magnetoresistance (GMR) is a quantum mechanical magnetoresistance effect observed in multilayers composed of alternating ferromagnetic and non-magnetic conductive layers. The 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg for the discovery of GMR.Copper (non-magnetic metal). F – the Fermi level. The vertical axis is energy in eV.Cobalt (majority spins)Cobalt (minority spins) Giant magnetoresistance (GMR) is a quantum mechanical magnetoresistance effect observed in multilayers composed of alternating ferromagnetic and non-magnetic conductive layers. The 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg for the discovery of GMR. The effect is observed as a significant change in the electrical resistance depending on whether the magnetization of adjacent ferromagnetic layers are in a parallel or an antiparallel alignment. The overall resistance is relatively low for parallel alignment and relatively high for antiparallel alignment. The magnetization direction can be controlled, for example, by applying an external magnetic field. The effect is based on the dependence of electron scattering on the spin orientation. The main application of GMR is magnetic field sensors, which are used to read data in hard disk drives, biosensors, microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and other devices. GMR multilayer structures are also used in magnetoresistive random-access memory (MRAM) as cells that store one bit of information. In literature, the term giant magnetoresistance is sometimes confused with colossal magnetoresistance of ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic semiconductors, which is not related to the multilayer structure. Magnetoresistance is the dependence of the electrical resistance of a sample on the strength of an external magnetic field. Numerically, it is characterized by the value where R(H) is the resistance of the sample in a magnetic field H, and R(0) corresponds to H = 0. Alternative forms of this expression may use electrical resistivity instead of resistance, a different sign for δH, and are sometimes normalized by R(H) rather than R(0). The term 'giant magnetoresistance' indicates that the value δH for multilayer structures significantly exceeds the anisotropic magnetoresistance, which has a typical value within a few percent. GMR was discovered in 1988 independently by the groups of Albert Fert of the University of Paris-Sud, France, and Peter Grünberg of Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany. The practical significance of this experimental discovery was recognized by the Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to Fert and Grünberg in 2007. The first mathematical model describing the effect of magnetization on the mobility of charge carriers in solids, related to the spin of those carriers, was reported in 1936. Experimental evidence of the potential enhancement of δH has been known since the 1960s. By the late 1980s, the anisotropic magnetoresistance had been well explored, but the corresponding value of δH did not exceed a few percent. The enhancement of δH became possible with the advent of sample preparation techniques such as molecular beam epitaxy, which allows manufacturing multilayer thin films with a thickness of several nanometers.