Electrode artifacts in low resistance organic spin valves

Artifacts can originate from the inherent shortcomings of the cross bar configuration, when the resistance of the device is small compared to that of one of the electrodes. This is particularly relevant to the field of organic spintronics, in which at least one recent work overlooked this effect. We use a simplified one-dimensional resistor model and a full three-dimensional finite element method simulation to show that an increase in the resistance of one electrode appears as a decrease of the measured resistance. We found that the model agrees qualitatively but not quantitatively with observation.