Effect of spin-orbit coupling on spin transport at graphene/transition metal interface

In spite of large spin coherence length in graphene due to small spin-orbit coupling, the created potential barrier and antiferromagnetic coupling at graphene/transition metal (TM) contacts strongly reduce the spin transport behavior in graphene. Keeping these critical issues in mind in the present work, ferromagnetic (Co, Ni) nanosheets are grown on graphene surface to elucidate the nature of interaction at the graphene/ferromagnetic interface to improve the spin transistor characteristics. Temperature dependent magnetoconductance shows unusual behavior exhibiting giant enhancement in magnetoconductance with increasing temperature. A model based on spin-orbit coupling operated at the graphene/TM interface is proposed to explain this anomalous result. We believe that the device performance can be improved remarkably tuning the spin-orbit coupling at the interface of graphene based spin transistor. (C) 2015 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim