Effect of interfacial coupling on rectification in organic spin rectifiers**Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 1374195), the Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province, China (Grant No. ZR2014AM017), and the Excellent Young Scholars Research Fund of Shandong Normal University, China.

Abstract

The effect of interfacial coupling on rectification in an organic co-oligomer spin diode is investigated theoretically by considering spin-independent and spin-resolved couplings respectively. In the case of spin-independent coupling, an optimal interfacial coupling strength with a significant enhanced rectification ratio is found, whose value depends on the structural asymmetry of the molecule. In the case of spin-resolved coupling, we found that only the variation of the interfacial coupling with specific spin is effective to modulate the rectification, which is due to the spin-filtering property of the central asymmetric magnetic molecule. A transition of the spin-current rectification between parallel spin-current rectification and antiparallel spin-current rectification may be observed with the variation of the spin-resolved interfacial coupling. The interfacial effect on rectification is further analyzed from the spin-dependent transmission spectrum at different biases.