Modeling of a ferromagnetic two-dimensional electron gas device

Abstract

We present a realistic modeling of ballistic electron transport in a hybrid ferromagnetic (FM) two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) device, consisting of an FM gate on an AlGaAs-GaAs or AlSb-InAs high electron mobility transistor (HEMT) heterostructure. The carriers within the 2DEG are spin-polarized by a combination of magnetic and electrostatic barriers. The magnetic barriers are supplied by a composite FM gate, consisting of two domains made of magnetically hard and soft materials. This gate arrangement breaks the antisymmetry of the fringe B field, and results in a finite spin polarization of the 2DEG current. The B field strength is calculated by considering the pole strength at the gate surfaces and domain boundary, and is significantly weaker than normally assumed. We obtain parameters such as the electrostatic barrier height, Fermi level, and carrier concentration within the 2DEG by a finite-element Poisson calculation, which is self-consistent with the Fermi-Dirac distribution. We calculate the transmission probability and conductance through the 2DEG from these parameter values, assuming a single particle effective mass Hamiltonian and purely ballistic transport. We show that the spin polarization ratio P G is extremely sensitive to the gate bias and HEMT doping concentration. However, the maximum P G is extremely low for AlGaAs-GaAs (0.003%) and even for AlSb-InAs (0.12%) devices, despite a large Lande g factor. These values are many orders of magnitude smaller than previous predictions of close to 100% polarization, obtained by using simpler models. © 2005 IEEE.