First-principles study of spin-transfer torque in Co2MnSi/Al/Co2MnSi spin-valve

The spin-transfer torque (STT) in Co2MnSi(CMS)/Al/Co2MnSi spin-valve system with and without interfacial disorder is studied by a first-principles noncollinear wave-function-matching method. It is shown that in the case of clean interface the angular dependence of STT for CoCo/Al (the asymmetry parameter Lambda approximate to 4.5) is more skewed than that for MnSi/Al (Lambda approximate to 2.9), which suggests the clean CoCo/Al architecture is much more efficient for the application on radio frequency oscillation. We also find that even with interfacial disorder the spin-valve of half-metallic CMS still has a relatively large parameter K compared to that of conventional ferromagnet. In addition, for clean interface the in-plane torkance of MnSi/Al is about twice as large as that of CoCo/Al. However, as long as the degree of interfacial disorder is sufficiently large, the CoCo/Al and MnSi/Al will show approximately the same magnitude of in-plane torkance. Furthermore, our results demonstrate that CMS/Al/CMS system has very high efficiency of STT to switch the magnetic layer of spin-valve. (C) 2013 AIP Publishing LLC.