Measurement of shot noise in magnetic tunnel junction and its utilization for accurate system calibration

Abstract

This work presents a technique to calibrate the spin torque oscillator (STO) measurement system by utilizing the whiteness of shot noise. The raw shot noise spectrum in a magnetic tunnel junction based STO in the microwave frequency range is obtained by first subtracting the baseline noise, and then excluding the field dependent mag-noise components reflecting the thermally excited spin wave resonances. As the shot noise is guaranteed to be completely white, the total gain of the signal path should be proportional to the shot noise spectrum obtained by the above procedure, which allows for an accurate gain calibration of the system and a quantitative determination of each noise power. The power spectral density of the shot noise as a function of bias voltage obtained by this technique was compared with a theoretical calculation, which showed excellent agreement when the Fano factor was assumed to be 0.99.