Ge-Based Spin-Photodiodes for Room-Temperature Integrated Detection of Photon Helicity

Rinaldi, Christian; Cantoni, Matteo; Petti, Daniela; Sottocorno, Andrea; Leone, Marco; Caffrey, Nuala M.; Sanvito, Stefano; Bertacco, Riccardo

Ge-Based Spin-Photodiodes for Room-Temperature Integrated Detection of Photon Helicity

Type

Article

Authors

Rinaldi, Christian
Cantoni, Matteo
Petti, Daniela
Sottocorno, Andrea
Leone, Marco
Caffrey, Nuala M.
Sanvito, Stefano
Bertacco, Riccardo

Online Publication Date

2012-05-02

Print Publication Date

2012-06-12

Date

2012-05-02

Abstract

Spin-photodiodes based on Fe/MgO/Ge(001) heterostructures are reported. These devices perform the room-temperature integrated electrical detection of the spin polarization of a photocurrent generated by circularly polarized photons with a wavelength of 1300 nm, for light pulses with intensity I 0 down to 200 μW. A forward and reverse-biased average photocurrent variation of 5.9% is measured for the complete reversal of the incident light helicity. Copyright © 2012 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.

Citation

Rinaldi C, Cantoni M, Petti D, Sottocorno A, Leone M, et al. (2012) Ge-Based Spin-Photodiodes for Room-Temperature Integrated Detection of Photon Helicity. Advanced Materials 24: 3037–3041. Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/adma.201104256.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank J. Gazquez and M. Varela for the transmission electron microscopy analysis, and G. Isella, P. Vavassori, H. Jaffres, and A. Fert for fruitful discussions. N.M.C. and S. S. thank Ivan Rungger for making available a version of Smeagol dealing with electrodes made of different materials, and for useful discussions. This work was partially supported by Science Foundation Ireland (Grant No. 07/IN.1/I945). The Smeagol code was supported by CRANN and by KAUST (ACRAB project).