Abstract
Abstract Spintronics, at the interface between magnetism and electronics, includes a broad class of phenomena based on the influence of the spin on the electronic transport in ferromagnetic materials. This influence has been known for a long time in bulk materials but its exploitation in magnetic nanostructures came only in the eighties. The giant magnetoresistance (GMR) of the magnetic multilayers, discovered in 1988, opened the way. Nowadays, the GMR is used in various devices and, in particular, in the read heads of the hard disc drives (HDD) of our computers. The tunnelling magnetoresistance, an effect similar to the GMR but observed in magnetic tunnel junctions, is now applied in some HDD and a new type of magnetic memory called magnetic random access memory. Several promising new directions of research are emerging today. In this chapter, after having presented the fundamentals of conduction in ferromagnetic conductors, we describe the basic physics of spin transport in magnetic multilayers and tunnel junctions.
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