Contact-induced charge contributions to non-local spin transport measurements in Co/MgO/graphene devices

Abstract

Recently, it has been shown that oxide barriers in graphene-based non-local spin-valve structures can be the bottleneck for spin transport. The barriers may cause spin dephasing during or right after electrical spin injection which limits spin transport parameters such as the spin lifetime of the whole device. An important task is to characterize the quality of the oxide barriers of both spin injection and detection contacts in a fabricated device. To address this issue, we discuss the influence of spatially inhomogeneous oxide barriers and especially conducting pinholes within the barriers on the background signal in non-local measurements of graphene/MgO/Co spin-valve devices. By both simulations and reference measurements on devices with non-ferromagnetic electrodes, we demonstrate that the background signal can be caused by an inhomogeneous current flow through the oxide barriers. As a main result, we demonstrate the existence of charge accumulation besides the actual spin accumulation signal in non-local voltage measurements, which can be explained by a redistribution of charge carriers by a perpendicular magnetic field similar to the classical Hall effect. Furthermore, we present systematic studies of the phase of the low frequency non-local ac voltage signal which is measured in non-local spin measurements when applying ac lock-in techniques. This phase has so far widely been neglected in the analysis of non-local spin transport. We demonstrate that this phase is another hallmark of the homogeneity of the MgO spin injection and detection barriers. We link backgate dependent changes of the phase to the interplay between the capacitance of the oxide barrier and the quantum capacitance of graphene.