Adiabatic and non-adiabatic quantum charge and spin pumping in zigzag and armchair graphene nanoribbons

Abstract

We propose a graphene nanoribbon pumping device and study its quantum charge and spin pumping properties for both adiabatic and non-adiabatic regimes by using the Keldysh non-equilibrium Green's function and renormalization procedure. We show that the adiabatic regime is suitable for the generation of high charge current, while the non-adiabatic regime is appropriate for the generation of fully spin polarized and pure spin currents. Also, it is shown that the proposed device can act as a perfect and controllable spin filter. Moreover, we investigate the effects of width and edge of graphene nanoribbons and show that the pumped charge current in the zigzag graphene nanoribbon (ZGNR) strongly depends on nanoribbon width so that the maximum pumped current for width with even numbers of carbon chains is about one order of magnitude larger than that with odd numbers. In contrast with ZGNR, in armchair graphene nanoribbon, the pumped currents with even and odd numbers have the same order of magnitude.