Electronic Spin Transport in Dual-Gated Bilayer Graphene

Ahmet Avsar, Ivan Jesus Vera-Marun, Jun You Tan, Gavin Kok Wai Koon, Kenji Watanabe, Takashi Taniguchi, Shaffique Adam, Barbaros Ozyilmaz

Published 2016-02-25Version 1

The elimination of extrinsic sources of spin relaxation is the key to the realization of the exceptional intrinsic spin transport performance of graphene. Towards this, we study charge and spin transport in bilayer graphene-based spin valve devices fabricated in a new device architecture that allows us to make a comparative study for separately investigating the roles of substrate and polymer residues on spin relaxation. The comparison between spin valves fabricated on SiO2 and BN substrates suggests that substrate-related charged impurities, phonons and roughness do not limit the spin transport in current devices. On the other hand, the observation of a 5-fold enhancement in spin relaxation time in the encapsulated device highlights the significance of polymer residues on spin relaxation. We observe a spin relaxation length of ~ 10 um in the encapsulated bilayer with a charge mobility of 24000 cm2/Vs. The carrier density dependence of spin relaxation time has two distinct regimes; n<4x1012cm-2, where spin relaxation time decreases monotonically as carrier concentration increases and n>4x1012cm-2, where spin relaxation time exhibits a sudden increase. The sudden increase in the spin relaxation time with no corresponding signature in the charge transport suggests the observation of a magnetic resonance close to the charge neutrality point. We also demonstrate, for the first time, spin transport across bipolar p-n junctions in our dual-gated device architecture that fully integrates a sequence of encapsulated regions in its design. At low temperatures, strong suppression of spin signal was observed while a transport gap is induced, which is interpreted as a novel manifestation of impedance mismatch within the spin channel.