A high reproducibility in the performance of cobalt/copper and permalloy/copper lateral spin valves with transparent contacts is obtained by optimizing the interface quality and the purity of copper. This allows us to study comprehensively the spin injection properties of both ferromagnetic materials, as well as the spin transport properties of copper, which are not affected by the used ferromagnetic material, leading to long spin diffusion lengths. Spin polarizations of permalloy and cobalt are obtained as a function of temperature. Analysis of the temperature dependence of both the spin polarization and conductivity of permalloy using the standard two-channel model for ferromagnetic metals suggests that a correction factor of ~2 is needed for the spin polarization values obtained by lateral spin valve experiments.
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