Non-Equilibrium Green’s Function Modeling of the Transport Characteristics of Magnetic Tunnel Junctions Containing Anderson Impurities

Abstract

A nonequilibrium Green’s function (NEGF) formulation to study the transport characteristics of magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs) that contains impurities at the barrier region and many-body interaction at the electrode region is presented. The formulation makes use of the already developed NEGF method for MTJs without any impurities and the impurity Green’s function is obtained using Haldane’s approach that explicitly takes into account the on-site Coulomb interaction ([Formula: see text]) of the impurity. The formulation is used to obtain the spin-dependent tunnel current of model MTJs as a function of the applied bias for different values of [Formula: see text] corresponding to both the parallel and antiparallel configuration of the end electrodes of the MTJ. The tunnel currents are used to obtain the tunnel magnetoresistance (TMR) of the MTJ and we observed from our study that the TMR is strongly influenced by the impurities. The TMR is found to be reduced compared to that of the MTJ without impurities and the bias dependence of the TMR is found to be strongly influenced by [Formula: see text]. Our studies revealed that the MTJ can exhibit almost completely spin polarized current at certain values of [Formula: see text].