Inelastic tunneling conductance and magnetoresistance investigations in dual ion-beam sputtered CoFeB(110)/MgO/CoFeB (110) magnetic tunnel junctions

Abstract

Magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs) comprising Ta(5)/NiFe(5)/IrMn(15)/CoFeB(5) /Mg(1)/MgO(3.5)/CoFeB(5)/Ta(5)/Ag(20) (thickness in nm) with (110) oriented CoFeB layers are grown using dual ion beam sputtering. The tunnel magnetoresistance (TMR) of MTJs is found to be significantly bias dependent and exhibits zero bias anomaly (ZBA) which is attributed to the presence of magnetic impurities or diffusion of Mn from antiferromagnetic IrMn in the barrier. Adjacent to the ZBA, two peaks at 24±3mV and 34±3mV are also observed, which differ both in intensity as well as their position in the antiparallel and parallel magnetic states, suggesting that they are due to magnon excitations. In addition to this, a phonon peak at 65 ± 3 mV is also observed. The effect of temperature on the inelastic and elastic tunneling contributions is studied in detail in 25-300 K range using the Glazman and Matveev model. Ten series of localized states are found to be involved in hopping conduction in the forbidden gap of MgO barrier. The effect of presence of such inelastic channels is found to be insignificant at low temperatures yielding sizeable enhancement in TMR. © 2014 AIP Publishing LLC.