Computational designing of main group based low dimensional ferromagnetic half-metallic materials for spintronics applications

Abstract

Continuous reduction in transistors size has become a mandatory approach to keep pace with the rapidly increasing complex integrated circuits (IC). However, this continuous downscaling of the transistor has approached to a limit as the charge based semiconductor device started facing several problems namely short channel effects (SCE) which degrades the performance of the device. Therefore, several novel approaches have been explored by the researchers to prevail these barricades. Spintronics is one of these emerging technologies which can overcome this problem. Magnetic random-access memory (MRAM) and spin-transfer torque random-access memory (STT-RAM) are those two new technologies which could revolutionize in quantum computing and memory industry. Both of these MRAM as well as STT-RAM consist of magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ), which works on the principle of spintronics. MTJ consists of one insulating layer sandwiched between two ferromagnetic layers. The tunneling current in MTJ depends on the relative orientation of magnetizations of the two ferromagnetic layers. Half-metallic materials play a very crucial role in MTJ since it can provide 100% spin-polarized current. Transition metal-free ferromagnetism and half-metallicity in atomically thin 2D materials have drawn considerable attention among the researchers due to its potential application in spintronics. Main-group based materials play a very crucial role in this context due to their longer spin-relaxation time. In recent times, several van der Waals layered materials have gained lot of attention for their interesting magnetic properties and easily exfoliation properties. However, many cases the Curie temperature for these materials is much lower than even room temperature. Therefore, more efforts need to be devoted to achieve robust ferromagnetism, half-metallicity along with high Curie temperature in two dimensional as well as one dimensional material.