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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Introduction to Spintronics

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Spintronics was born in 1988 with the discovery of GMR provided simultaneously by A. Fert and P. Grunberg and rewarded in 2007 with the Nobel Prize in Physics. This field has since been largely exploited on the market, for example it has been at the base of every hard disk read head. Spintronics field is extremely active and interesting from both a fundamental point of view and for technological applications. Currently, with the aim at new functionalities, there is an increased activity from materials research perspective to understand and develop spintronics devices using materials with new properties like carbon nanotubes, graphene, topological insulators and molecules. This chapter will start with the description of the electronic structure of ferromagnetic metals. The principle of a basic spintronic device will be then presented and finally, it will focus on magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs) with a more detailed description of the tunneling magnetoresistance (TMR) effect proper to these systems.