Spintronic technology advances with newly designed magnetic tunnel junctions

For the last two decades, magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs) have played a central role in spintronic devices such as read heads of hard disk drives and nonvolatile magnetoresistive random access memories (MRAMs), and researchers are constantly working to improve their performance. One of the most prominent achievements that accelerated the technology's practical applications was the realization of giant tunnel magnetoresistance (TMR) ratios by using rock-salt type MgO crystalline barrier. Now, in