ABSTRACT
While spintronics is consolidating as the leading technology in the magnetic data storage industry and is emerging into both the sensors and the random access memories arena, the interest of the scienti¢c community has grown into investigating new materials di¥erent from conventional metals and semiconductors. Ferromagnetic insulators presenting a spontaneous electric polarization and magnetic semiconductors have been both proposed as electronic barriers for magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJ) [1,2] raising the expectation for multifunctional devices. Likewise, the search for new materials and material combinations to be used for generating highly spin-polarized currents, but at the same time having a small magnetic moment, has witnessed a substantial boost because of their potential for delivering applications based on spin-transfer torque [3,4].
