Magnetoresistance In Nanocontacts

The study of magnetoresistance (MR) is one of the most exciting topics, due to its great importance for technical applications as hard-disk read heads and magnetic storage media like magnetoresistance random access memory. Renewed interest in submicron scale ferromagnetic nanocontacts has been stimulated greatly by the discovery of ballistic magnetoresistance (BMR) in 1999. The obtained ballistic magnetoresistance in mechanically formed nanocontacts reaches few hundred percents, which is attributed to the scattering of conducting electrons by a constricted domain wall (DW) within the nanocontacts. Recently, many electrodeposited nanocontacts were also used to investigate ballistic magnetoresistance, some of which demonstrates even larger magnetoresistance than the mechanically formed ones. But there are some major issues in the electrodeposited nanocontacts, such as poor reproducibility, low stability and there isn't a widely accepted explanation for these phenomena. In this paper, we report our own data sets, and analyze the results systemically.