Determination of spin diffusion length of gold utilizing lateral spin valves

Spin transport in lateral metallic structures is an intriguing, emerging area, which offers rich opportunities to explore complex spintronic devices. We demonstrate spin injection, diffusion, and detection in a series of lateral spin valves. A 220-nm wide and 20-nm thick gold wire is defined by e-beam lithography on a SiN substrate. Two permalloy (Py) electrodes, an injector and a detector, are subsequently overlaid on the Au wire. The charge current and spin current are separated by connecting current drain and voltage ground to opposite ends of the Au wire. A charge current that passes through the Py injector into the Au induces a spin accumulation, resulting in a split of the chemical potentials for the spin-up and spin-down electrons in the Au. The injected spins diffuse away on both sides of the injector, resulting in a spin current towards the detector even without a charge current. Depending on the relative orientations of the accumulated spin and the detector spin, a voltage contrast can be observed at the detector/Au interface. This separation of charge and spin currents results in a large percentage value of the spin signals, which rules out the possibilities of spurious effects such as AMR. By changing the injector-detector separation, we observe an exponential decay of the spin signals, and thus determine a spin diffusion length of 63 nm in Au at 10 K.