AVS 50th International Symposium
    Magnetic Interfaces and Nanostructures Monday Sessions
       Session MI-MoA

Paper MI-MoA8
Artifacts in Ballistic Magnetoresistance Measurements

Monday, November 3, 2003, 4:20 pm, Room 316

Session: Magnetic Recording and Magnetoresistive Structures
Presenter: W.F. Egelhoff, National Institute of Standards and Technology
Authors: W.F. Egelhoff, National Institute of Standards and Technology
M.D. Stiles, National Institute of Standards and Technology
T.P. Moffat, National Institute of Standards and Technology
J. Mallett, National Institute of Standards and Technology
R.D. McMichael, National Institute of Standards and Technology
H. Ettedugi, National Institute of Standards and Technology
A.J. Shapiro, National Institute of Standards and Technology
C.J. Powell, National Institute of Standards and Technology
E.B Svedberg, Seagate
Correspondent: Click to Email
The Ballistic Magnetoresistance (BMR) effect has attracted much attention in the past year with BMR values as large as 100,000% having been reported in Physical Review@footnote 1@ and 1,000,000% reported at Intermag2003.@footnote 2@. Naturally, such impressive results have led many researchers to attempt to reproduce large BMR values. Unfortunately, these attempts have widely failed. This failure has led to much skepticism over whether BMR is a real effect. In our research, we have found several artifacts caused by magnetostriction and magnetostatics that can produce what appear to be huge BMR values. In this talk, we will illustrate these artifacts, provide an assessment of the implications these artifacts have for the field of BMR, and give guidelines for performing BMR measurements in an artifact-free manner. We will also present results of new BMR measurements in which we follow our recommended procedures. @FootnoteText@@footnote 1@S. Z. Hua and H. D. Chopra Phys. Rev. B 67, 060401 (2003). @footnote 2@Nicolas Garcia, invited talk, Intermag2003.