Room-temperature spin injection from a ferromagnetic semiconductor

Spin injection using ferromagnetic semiconductors at room temperature is a building block for the realization of spin-functional semiconductor devices. Nevertheless, this has been very challenging due to the lack of reliable room-temperature ferromagnetism in well-known group IV and III-V based semiconductors. Here, we demonstrate room-temperature spin injection by using spin pumping in a BiSb/(Ga,Fe)Sb heterostructure, where (Ga,Fe)Sb is a ferromagnetic semiconductor (FMS) with high Curie temperature (T-C) and BiSb is a topological insulator (TI). Despite the very small magnetization of (Ga,Fe)Sb at room temperature (45 emu/cc), we detected spin injection from (Ga,Fe)Sb by utilizing the large inverse spin Hall effect (ISHE) in BiSb. Our study provides the first demonstration of spin injection at room temperature from a FMS.

Automated summary

We demonstrate room-temperature spin injection using spin pumping in a BiSb/(Ga,Fe)Sb heterostructure, where (Ga,Fe)Sb is a ferromagnetic semiconductor with high Curie temperature and BiSb is a topological insulator. Despite the small magnetization of (Ga,Fe)Sb at room temperature, we detected spin injection from (Ga,Fe)Sb by utilizing the large inverse spin Hall effect in BiSb. This study provides the first demonstration of room-temperature spin injection from a ferromagnetic semiconductor.