Conductance in Co/Al2O3/Si/Al2O3 permalloy with asymmetrically doped barrier

Abstract

We report on dependence of conductance and tunnelling magnetoresistance on bias voltage at different temperatures down to 2K in Co|Al2O3(10Å)|Si(δ)|Al2O3(2Å)|Permalloy magnetic tunnel junctions. Complementary low frequency noise measurements are used to understand the conductance results. The obtained data indicate the breakdown of the Coulomb blockade for thickness of the asymmetric silicon layer exceeding 1.2Å. The crossover in the conductance, the dependence of the tunnelling magnetoresistance with the bias voltage and the noise below 80K correspond to 1 monolayer coverage. Interestingly, the zero bias magnetoresistance remains nearly unaffected by the presence of the silicon layer. The proposed model uses Larkin-Matveev approximation of tunnelling through a single impurity layer generalized to 3D case and takes into account the variation of the barrier shape with the bias voltage. The main difference is the localization of all the impurity levels within a single atomic layer. In the high thickness case, up to 1.8Å, we have introduced a phenomenological parameter, which reflects the number of single levels on the total density of silicon atoms.