A novel three-terminal spintronics device utilizing the spin Hall effect

Previous work\footnote{Luqiao Liu \textit{et al.,}arXiv:1110.6846 and Luqiao Liu invited presentation this conference (focus topic 10.1.4)} has established that the spin Hall effect (SHE) in certain thin film metallic layers can generate a transverse spin current large enough to effect, through spin transfer torque (STT), the reversible magnetic switching of an adjacent ferromagnetic layer having perpendicular magnetic anisotropy. Here we discuss a new three-terminal spintronics device that utilizes the SHE induced STT to efficiently and reversibly switch the magnetic orientation of a thin free layer electrode of an MgO magnetic tunnel junction having in-plane magnetization. The low write currents ($\le $ 1mA), large output impedance and good thermal stability (45k$_{B}$T) that has been achieved with this SHE three-terminal device approach, which separates the write and read operations in a manner that is relatively straightforward to fabricate, demonstrate an attractive candidate for application in next generation STT MRAM and non-volatile spin logic circuits.