ABSTRACT
Spintronics is an important field of research with major applications in several technologies. Its development has been triggered by the discovery of giant magnetoresistance in 1988. Spin-polarized currents can be generated by exploiting the influence of the spin on the transport properties of the electrons in ferromagnetic conductors. Spin mixing comes from spin-flip scattering, mainly from electron-magnon scattering, which conserves the total spin of the electronic system but is a mechanism of transfer between the several channels. In the mid-1980s, with the development of techniques such as molecular beam epitaxy, it became possible to fabricate multilayers composed of very thin individual layers and one could consider trying to extend the experiments on ternary alloys to multilayers. An important stage in the development of spintronics has been the research on the tunneling magnetoresistance of the magnetic tunnel junctions. The physics of the spin accumulation occurring when an electron flux crosses an interface between a ferromagnetic and a nonmagnetic material is explained.
