This book is aims to be a comprehensive source on the physics and engineering of magneto-resistive heads. Most of the material is presented in a nonmathematical manner to make it more digestible for researchers, students, developers, and engineers.In addition to revising and updating material available in the first edition, Mallinson has added nine new chapters dealing with various aspects concerning spin valves, the electron spin tunneling effect, the electrostatic discharge effects, read amplifiers, and signal-to-noise ratios, making this a completely up-to-date reference.The previous edition of Magneto-Resistive Heads was the first volume in the new Academic Press series in Electromagnetism edited by Professor Isaak Mayergoyz, who is a well-recognized expert in the field.

Since the discovery of the giant magnetoresistance (GMR) effect in 1988, spintronics has been presented as a new technology paradigm, awarded by the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2007. Initially used in read heads of hard disk drives, and while disputing a piece of the market to the flash memories, GMR devices have broadened their range of usage by growing towards magnetic field sensing applications in a huge range of scenarios. Potential applications at the time of the discovery have become real in the last two decades. Definitively, GMR was born to stand. In this sense, selected successful approaches of GMR based sensors in different applications: space, automotive, microelectronics, biotechnology ... are collected in the present book. While keeping a practical orientation, the fundamentals as well as the current trends and challenges of this technology are also analyzed. In this sense, state of the art contributions from academy and industry can be found through the contents. This book can be used by starting researchers, postgraduate students and multidisciplinary scientists in order to have a reference text in this topical fascinating field.

This is one of the first application-orientated books on the subject. The main topics are magnetic sensors with high resolutions and magnetic read heads with high sensitivities, required for hard-disk drives with recording densities of several gigabytes. Another important subject is novel magnetic random-access memory (MRAM) with non-volatile non-destructive and radiation-hard characteristics.

This unified overview of recent progress in a growing, multi-disciplinary field places special emphasis on the industrial applications of magnetic multilayered materials. The text describes a wide range of physical aspects, together with experimental and theoretical methods.

The arrival of the 'information age' took most people by surprise – including scientists and technologists. Today, research on better, smaller, and faster ways to store and transfer information continues to grow, and growing fast within this scope is the field of magnetoelectronics. With its possibilities as a magnetic storage technology capable of overcoming the vulnerabilities of CMOS (complementary metal on oxide semiconductor), magnetoelectronics promises to be an important installation in the information era.

The arrival of the 'information age' took most people by surprise - including scientists and technologists. Today, research on better, smaller, and faster ways to store and transfer information continues to grow, and growing fast within this scope is the field of magnetoelectronics. With its possibilities as a magnetic storage technology capable of overcoming the vulnerabilities of CMOS (complementary metal on oxide semiconductor), magnetoelectronics promises to be an important installation in the information era.

Fundamentals of Magnetism and Spintronics, develops the idea of magnetism, understand its sources and other related matters step by step. Fundamentals of Magnetism and Spintronics, describes microscopic sources of magnetic field and explains why different bodies behave differently in the presence of an external magnetic field. Different topics in Magnetism and Spintronics have been presented in simple ways using simple mathematics. The objectives are to cover the basic concepts of Magnetism and Spintronics using simple models and to provide coverage of the subject matter as far as possible. Chapters 1 to 3 have been devoted to define the microscopic source of magnetism and to define fundamental parameters of magnetism. Chapter 4 to Chapter 11 have been devoted for the general properties of magnetic materials. There has been tremendous research in the field of material science and magnetism and as a result remarkable success has been achieved in magnetic storage technology. A new subject known as spintronics or magneto-electronics has come up, which is a novel kind of union of elements of material science, magnetism and electrical engineering, with a goal to create devices and architectures for digital electronics applications. Chapter 12 has been devoted to introduce this subject to the students. Simple pictures and heuristic descriptions have been given to introduce basic ideas of spintronics, transport of spin polarized electrons, mechanisms by which several magnetoelectronic devices operate, and basic architectures of MRAM. Contents Chapter 2: Angular momentum 21 Chapter 3: Some definitions 51 Chapter 4: Diamagnetic and Paramagnetic properties of Solids 81 Chapter 5: Magnetism of ordered systems 114 Chapter 6: Spin Waves : Magnons 146 Chapter 7: Magnetic Energies and Magnetic Domains 157 Chapter 8: Magnetic Resonance Phenomena 204 Chapter 9: Magnetism in Thin Films 247 Chapter 10: Some Magnetic Phenomena 259 Chapter 11: Magnetic measurements 286 Chapter 12: Fundamentals of Spintronics 299 Problems 357 References 373