Circuit-model analysis for spintronic devices with chiral molecules as spin injectors

Abstract

Recent research discovered that charge-transfer processes in chiral molecules can be spin-selective, and the effect was named chiral-induced spin selectivity (CISS). Follow-up work studied hybrid spintronic devices with conventional electronic materials and chiral (bio)molecules. However, a theoretical foundation for the CISS effect is still in development, and the spintronic signals were not evaluated quantitatively. We present a circuit-model approach that can provide quantitative evaluations. Our analysis assumes the scheme of a recent experiment that used photosystem I (PSI) as spin injectors, for which we find that the experimentally observed signals are, under any reasonable assumptions on relevant PSI timescales, too high to be fully due to the CISS effect. We also show that the CISS effect can in principle be detected using the same type of solid-state device, and by replacing silver with graphene, the signals due to spin generation can be enlarged four orders of magnitude. Our approach thus provides a generic framework for analyzing these types of experiments and advancing the understanding of the CISS effect.