Magnetoresistance in Boron Carbide junctions

The properties of thin insulator layers are crucial to the performance of magnetic tunnel junctions. Commercial requirements are a device with a high tunnel magnetoresistance (TMR) with low cost and high stability. At present the vast majority of barriers are made from amorphous Al$_{2}$O$_{3}$ and crystalline MgO. The TMR value depends not only on the spin-dependent electronic structure of the electrodes, but on the metal-insulator interface. Oxide-type barriers may suffer from local vacancies and other type of defects, resulting in oxygen diffusion, making the TMR value unstable with time. We present TMR results obtained on a non-oxide barrier, boron carbide (B$_{10}$C$_{2})$ for applications in magnetic tunnel junctions. This low $Z $inorganic material can be grown by plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) without pinholes in the ultra thin film regime. PECVD grown boron carbide is an excellent dielectric with resistivities in the range of 10$^{7}$ ohm-cm, with a band gap that can be adjusted from 0.7 eV to 1.9 eV by altering the boron to carbon ratio and to band gap values well above 2.7 eV by adding phosphorus. This creates a unique opportunity for experimental study of a broad spectrum of phenomena, related to the dielectric properties of the barrier.