A first principle numerical approach to spin dependent transport

Abstract

The effects like magnetoresistance (MR) of a magnetic junction or efficiency of spin injection from ferromagnet (FM) into semiconductor (SC) are the manifestations of spin-dependent transport in complicated multilayered structures and arises due to the spin filtering at ferromagnetic and nonmagnetic metal layers (FM/NM) or ferromagnetic and nonmagnetic insulator (FM/I) or ferromagnet and semiconductor (FM/SC) interfaces. For accurate description of the electronic and structural properties of such interfaces as well as their bulk materials various numerical methods like Density Functional Theory (DFT), Tight Binding-Muffin Tin Orbitals (TB-MTO), Wave Function Matching (WFM), Landauer-Buttiker Approach (LBA) are in use. We review these numerical methods in this paper.