Rajiv Misra

Electric field gating with ionic liquids

The authors show that ionic liquids are well suited to specialized electric field gating applications in which large surface charge densities can be induced on the surfaces of low-carrier density thin-film metals. Using either coplanar or overlay gate configurations, they demonstrate field-induced resistance changes on the order of a factor of 104 for thin conducting InOx films. The areal capacitances and field effect mobilities noticeably exceed those that can be achieved using AlOx dielectrics. In addition, the charge state can be frozen in by reducing the temperature, thus providing an opportunity for electric field tuning of metal-insulator transitions in a variety of thin-film systems.

Weak-Localization Correction to the Anomalous Hall Effect in Polycrystalline Fe Films

In situ transport measurements have been made on ultrathin (<100 A thick) polycrystalline Fe films as a function of temperature and magnetic field for a wide range of disorder strengths. For sheet resistances Rxx less than approximately 3kOmega, we find a logarithmic temperature dependence of the anomalous Hall conductivity sigmaxy, which is shown for the first time to be due to a universal scale dependent weak-localization correction within the skew-scattering model. For higher sheet resistance, granularity becomes important and the break down of universal behavior becomes manifest as the prefactors of the lnT correction term to sigmaxx and sigmaxy decrease at different rates with increasing disorder.

Finite size effects with variable range exchange coupling in thin-film Pd/Fe/Pd trilayers

Abstract The magnetic properties of thin-film Pd/Fe/Pd trilayers in which an embedded ∼ 1.5 A - thick ultrathin layer of Fe induces ferromagnetism in the surrounding Pd have been investigated. The thickness of the ferromagnetic trilayer is controlled by varying the thickness of the top Pd layer over a range from 8 to 56 A . As the thickness of the top Pd layer decreases, or equivalently as the embedded Fe layer moves closer to the top surface, the saturated magnetization normalized to area and the Curie temperature decreases, whereas the coercivity increases. These thickness-dependent observations for proximity-polarized thin-film Pd are qualitatively consistent with finite size effects that are well known for regular thin-film ferromagnets. The critical exponent β of the order parameter (magnetization) is found to approach the mean field value of 0.5 as the thickness of the top Pd layer increases. The functional forms for the thickness dependences, which are strongly modified by the nonuniform exchange interaction in the polarized Pd, provide important new insights to understand nanomagnetism in two-dimensions.

Asymmetric metal-insulator transition in disordered ferromagnetic films.

We present experimental data and a theoretical interpretation of the conductance near the metal-insulator transition in thin ferromagnetic Gd films of thickness b ≈ 2-10  nm. A large phase relaxation rate caused by scattering of quasiparticles off spin-wave excitations renders the dephasing length L(ϕ) ≲ b in the range of sheet resistances considered, so that the effective dimension is d = 3. The conductivity data at different stages of disorder obey a fractional power-law temperature dependence and collapse onto two scaling curves for the metallic and insulating regimes, indicating an asymmetric metal-insulator transition with two distinctly different critical exponents; the best fit is obtained for a dynamical exponent z ≈ 2.5 and a correlation (localization) length critical exponent ν- ≈ 1.4 (ν+ ≈ 0.8) on the metallic (insulating) side.

Spin-wave-mediated quantum corrections to the conductivity of thin ferromagnetic films of gadolinium

and ferromagnetic3GaMn As nanostructures is somewhat surprising since themagnetic fields associated with the magnetic domains mightbe expected to destroy the requisite quantum interference ofself-intersecting electron trajectories. Since WL effects arecut off by various temperature-independent phase breakingscatterings and especially by the magnetic field inside theferromagnet, one needs a sufficiently large temperature-dependent phase relaxation rate 1/ to have an experimen-tally accessible disorder and temperature interval where sucheffects can be observed. Recent studies of the anomalousHall AH effect in thin Fe films