(The American Physical Society, 2002-12-31) Chung, S. H.; Munoz, M.; Garcıa, N.; Egelhoff, W. F.; Gomez, R. D.
We show that ballistic magnetoresistance exhibits universal scaling in atomic or nanometer scale
contacts. Plotting the data as conductance, we find that, if the maximum magnetoconductance is
normalized to unity and the conductance is scaled with the conductivity of the bulk material, the data
fall in a narrow region, independent of the nanocontact materials, for our four data sets and four from
the literature. The results agree with a theory that takes into account spin-scattering within a magneticdomain
wall.
