Length dependence of rectification in organic co-oligomer spin rectifiers**Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 11374195), the Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province, China (Grant No. ZR2014AM017), the Taishan Scholar Project of Shandong Province, China, and the Excellent Young Scholars Research Fund of Shandong Normal University, China.

Abstract

The rectification ratio of organic magnetic co-oligomer diodes is investigated theoretically by changing the molecular length. The results reveal two distinct length dependences of the rectification ratio: for a short molecular diode, the charge-current rectification changes little with the increase of molecular length, while the spin-current rectification is weakened sharply by the length; for a long molecular diode, both the charge-current and spin-current rectification ratios increase quickly with the length. The two kinds of dependence switch at a specific length accompanied with an inversion of the rectifying direction. The molecular ortibals and spin-resolved transmission analysis indicate that the dominant mechanism of rectification suffers a change at this specific length, that is, from asymmetric shift of molecular eigenlevels to asymmetric spatial localization of wave functions upon the reversal of bias. This work demonstrates a feasible way to control the rectification in organic co-oligomer spin diodes by adjusting the molecular length.