Monte Carlo simulation to study the effect of molecular spin state on the spatio-temporal evolution of equilibrium magnetic properties of magnetic tunnel junction based molecular spintronics devices

• Published in: AIP advances Vol. 11; no. 1
• Main Authors: Grizzle, Andrew, D’Angelo, Christopher, Tyagi, Pawan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States American Institute of Physics (AIP) 25.01.2021
• Subjects: CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSICS; MATERIALS SCIENCE; Molecular spintronics; Physics; Science & Technology - Other Topics
• ISSN: 2158-3226; 2158-3226

With a variable spin state, paramagnetic molecules can affect the impact of magnetic exchange coupling strength between two ferromagnetic electrodes. Our magnetic tunnel junction based molecular spintronics devices (MTJMSD) were successful in connecting paramagnetic single molecular magnet (SMM) between two ferromagnetic electrodes. Isolated SMM exhibited a wide range of spin states. However, it was extremely challenging to identify the SMM spin state when connected to the ferromagnetic electrodes. Our prior experimental and Monte Carlo Simulations (MCS) studies showed that paramagnetic molecules produced unprecedented strong antiferromagnetic coupling between two ferromagnets at room temperature. The overall antiferromagnetic coupling occurred when a paramagnetic SMM made antiferromagnetic coupling to the first electrode and ferromagnetic coupling to the second ferromagnetic electrode. This paper studies the impact of variable molecular spin states of the SMMs, producing strong antiferromagnetic coupling between the ferromagnetic electrodes of MTJMSD. The MTJMSD used in this study was represented by an 11 x 50 x 50 Ising model, with 11 being the thickness of the MTJMSD and 5 x 10 x 50 being each electrode’s size. We employed a continuous MCS algorithm to investigate SMM’s spin state’s impact as a function of molecular exchange coupling strength and thermal energy.