Abstract
With the end of Moore's law in sight, researchers are in search of an alternative approach to manipulate information. Spintronics or spin-based electronics, which uses the spin state of electrons to store, process and communicate information, offers exciting opportunities to sustain the current growth in the information industry. For example, the discovery of the giant magneto resistance (GMR) effect, which provides the foundation behind modern high density data storage devices, is an important success story of spintronics; GMR-based sensors have wide applications, ranging from automotive industry to biology. In recent years, with the tremendous progress in nanotechnology, spintronics has crossed the boundary of conventional, all metallic, solid state multi-layered structures to reach a new frontier, where nanostructures provide a pathway for the spin-carriers. Different materials such as organic and inorganic nanostructures are explored for possible applications in spintronics. In this short review, we focus on the boron nitride nanotube (BNNT), which has recently been explored for possible applications in spintronics. Unlike many organic materials, BNNTs offer higher thermal stability and higher resistance to oxidation. It has been reported that the metal-free fluorinated BNNT exhibits long range ferromagnetic spin ordering, which is stable at a temperature much higher than room temperature. Due to their large band gap, BNNTs are also explored as a tunnel magneto resistance device. In addition, the F-BNNT has recently been predicted as an ideal spin-filter. The purpose of this review is to highlight these recent progresses so that a concerted effort by both experimentalists and theorists can be carried out in the future to realize the true potential of BNNT-based spintronics.
Highlights
The boron nitride nanotube (BNNT) has a one dimensional tubular structure
This structurally insensitive electronic property of BNNTs is advantageous for their practical applications, because separating these tubular structures based on their chirality is prohibitively difficult, though some new potential techniques to achieve this have recently emerged [6,7]
One of the possible ways of tuning the band gap of BNNTs is by using a transverse electric field, which breaks the symmetry of the electronic states in the direction of applied field and mixes the nearby sub-bands in the conduction band complex and the valance band complex separately [21]
Summary
The boron nitride nanotube (BNNT) has a one dimensional tubular structure. Its existence was first predicted in 1994 [1,2]. Unlike the electronic properties of CNTs, which depend upon the chiral indices (m, n), the electronic properties of BNNTs are found to be independent of chirality [5] This structurally insensitive electronic property of BNNTs is advantageous for their practical applications, because separating these tubular structures based on their chirality is prohibitively difficult, though some new potential techniques to achieve this have recently emerged [6,7]. The development of viable synthesis techniques [12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20], together with various band gap modulating methods [21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29] have rekindled the hope in recent years and brought BNNTs into the forefront of material science research.
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