MAGNETIC-PROPERTIES SIMULATIONS OF CO RU INTERFACES/

In plane-electronic transport in UHV Co(32 Angstrom)/Ru(x Angstrom)/Co (32 Angstrom) sandwiches is analyzed with particular attention paid to the role of interface mixing on the moment and the giant magnetoresis tance (GMR) effect. The resistivity measurements show that the GMR is very small in these sandwiches due to the presence of intermixed CoRu alloy at the interfaces. The magnetic profile of this mixed interface has been determined by ab initio DFT-LDA calculations which show two d ifferent regions. Magnetic and non-magnetic regions which are centers of spin-dependent and strong spin-independent scattering, respectively , reduce the flow of polarized electrons from one ferromagnetic layer to the other. This intermixed interface has been successfully included in our GMR simulation using a semi-classical description of the two s pin channel currents to reproduce the experimental results. Copyright (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.