We report electrical spin injection from a ferromagnetic metal contact into a semiconductor light emitting diode structure with an injection efficiency of 30% which persists to room temperature. The Schottky barrier formed at the Fe/AlGaAs interface provides a natural tunnel barrier for injection of spin polarized electrons under reverse bias. These carriers radiatively recombine, emitting circularly polarized light, and the quantum selection rules relating the optical and carrier spin polarizations provide a quantitative, model-independent measure of injection efficiency. This demonstrates that spin injecting contacts can be formed using a widely employed contact methodology, providing a ready pathway for the integration of spin transport into semiconductor processing technology.

We report efficient electrical injection of spin-polarized carriers from a non-lattice-matched magnetic contact into a semiconductor heterostructure. The semimagnetic semiconductor ${\mathrm{Zn}}_{1-x}{\mathrm{Mn}}_x\mathrm{Se}$ is used as a spin-injecting contact on a GaAs-based light-emitting diode. Spin-polarized electrons are electrically injected across the II-VI/III-V interface, where they radiatively recombine in a GaAs quantum well and emit circularly polarized light. An analysis of the optical polarization which includes quantum confinement effects yields a lower bound of 50% for the spin injection efficiency.

The electron’s spin angular momentum is one of several alternative state variables under consideration on the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) for processing information in the fundamentally new ways that will be required beyond the ultimate scaling limits of silicon-based complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor technology¹. Electrical injection/transport of spin-polarized carriers is prerequisite for developing such an approach^2,3. Although significant progress has been realized in GaAs (ref. 4), little progress has been made in Si, despite its overwhelming dominance of the semiconductor industry. Here, we report successful injection of spin-polarized electrons from an iron film through an Al₂O₃ tunnel barrier into Si(001). The circular polarization of the electroluminescence resulting from radiative recombination in Si and in GaAs (in Si/AlGaAs/GaAs structures) tracks the Fe magnetization, confirming that these spin-polarized electrons originate from the Fe contact. The polarization reflects Fe majority spin. We determine a lower bound for the Si electron spin polarization of 10%, and obtain an estimate of ∼30% at 5 K, with significant polarization extending to at least 125 K. We further demonstrate spin transport across the Si/AlGaAs interface.

We probe the degree of circular polarization of the emitted photoluminescence from a single layer of MoS₂ as a function of the circularly polarized photo-excitation energy. A Single layer of MoS₂ has strong emission at around 1.9 eV associated with a direct transition at the K-point of the Brillouin zone. The circular polarization of the photoluminescence is very high for excitation near the bandgap and has a power-law decrease as the excitation energy increases. We identify phonon-assisted intervalley scattering as the primary spin relaxation mechanism and present a model that explains the wide variation in values for the polarization reported in the literature.