Functionalised graphene and alternative materials for heterostructures and spintronic devices

Abstract

As a trained electronics engineer, spintronics is appealing and has become a passion; combining electronics, quantum physics and novel materials. This passion was realised by being brought into contact with state of the art equipment, technologies and facilities through my microfabrication work, found only in the home of graphene, the University of Manchester. As interesting as it is, spintronics and graphene have still a long way to go until applications are realised, but the possibilities are innumerable and the challenges are copious. My research, described in this thesis, addresses the fabrication of devices which demonstrate techniques and point towards potential solutions, for a subset of the challenges: efficient injection and detection of spin states and their control, in a material with low intrinsic spin orbit coupling. Writing a thesis report is a challenging task, every single PhD student I have known agrees with that statement. The difficulty not necessarily reside on how challenging is the topic to grasp, but in trying to corral a meaningful and coherent story regarding the findings of the research and summarizing all the knowledge and experience gathered through the journey. It was not especially difficult to decide on the type of story I wanted to convey in this report, as device fabrication in the clean-room was my primary task, not only during my PhD but throughout my MPhil program too. The task for describing processes, analysing results and stating conclusions however, is not enough for a good quality report. Therefore, I describe in this report not only the processes I certainly learned, but also focus on the improvements I made to those processes. Those little changes were turned into real advantages for the several types of devices I fabricated. This report can be divided in three main sections, namely: theory, fabrication and results; in the case of the results, these are presented in the form of published papers in Chapters 4 and 5, and as a draft paper in Chapter 6.

Date of Award	1 Aug 2023
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Irina Grigorieva (Supervisor) & Ivan Vera Marun (Supervisor)