Scientists demonstrate breakthrough in tunnel barrier technology
Scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory have demonstrated, for the first time, the use of graphene as a tunnel barrier an electrically insulating barrier between two conducting materials through which electrons tunnel quantum mechanically. They report fabrication of magnetic tunnel junctions using graphene, a single atom thick sheet of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb lattice, between two ferromagnetic metal layers in a fully scalable photolithographic process. Their results demonstrate that single-layer graphene can function as an effective tunnel barrier for both charge and spin-based devices, and enable realization of more complex graphene-based devices for highly functional nanoscale circuits, such as tunnel transistors, non-volatile magnetic memory and reprogrammable spin logic. These research results are published in the online issue of Nano Letters.