Contact-induced spin relaxation in Hanle spin precession measurements

In the field of spintronics the conductivity mismatch problem remains an important issue. Here the difference between the resistance of ferromagnetic electrodes and a (high resistive) transport channel causes injected spins to be backscattered into the leads and to lose their spin information. We study the effect of the resulting contact-induced spin relaxation on spin transport, in particular on nonlocal Hanle precession measurements. As the Hanle line shape is modified by the contact-induced effects, the fits to Hanle curves can result in incorrectly determined spin transport properties of the transport channel. We quantify this effect that mimics a decrease of the spin relaxation time of the channel reaching more than four orders of magnitude and a minor increase of the diffusion coefficient by less than a factor of two. Then we compare the results to spin transport measurements on graphene from the literature. We further point out guidelines for a Hanle precession fitting procedure that allows the reliable extraction of spin transport properties from measurements.