Abstract
Abstract We investigate the photovoltaic behaviors of magnetic graphene interconnect junctions, which are constructed by zigzag graphene nanoribbons (ZGNRs), with the aim to produce pure spin current by photogalvanic effect (PGE). Two kinds of interconnect junctions are designed by connecting two 6-ZGNR with a carbon hexagon (C6) and a carbon tetragon (C4), respectively. It is found that zero charge current is produced under irradiation of light in both structures due to the presence of spatial inversion symmetry. Nevertheless, behind the zero charge current, net pure spin current is produced in the structure with a C6, but not in the structure with a C4. This difference originates from their different edge state distribution and different spatial inversion symmetry of the spin density. However, interestingly, local edge pure spin current can be obtained in both structures. More importantly, the pure spin current generation is independent of the photon energy, polarization type or polarization angle, suggesting a robust way of generating pure spin current with PGE and new possibility of graphene’s applications in spintronics.
Highlights
The field of two dimensional (2D) materials has been rapidly expanding in recent years and has drawn intensive research attention due to their exceptional mechanical, electronic and optoelectronic properties, providing promising building blocks for future nanoelectronic and photoelectronic devices [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14]
We investigate the photovoltaic behaviors of magnetic graphene interconnect junctions, which are constructed by zigzag graphene nanoribbons (ZGNRs), with the aim to produce pure spin current by photogalvanic effect (PGE)
For the two types of connection configurations, the photocurrent for either spin channel is zero when the photon energy is lower than the band gap (0.62 eV) of the 6-ZGNR since with photon energy below the band gap no electrons can be excited
Summary
The field of two dimensional (2D) materials has been rapidly expanding in recent years and has drawn intensive research attention due to their exceptional mechanical, electronic and optoelectronic properties, providing promising building blocks for future nanoelectronic and photoelectronic devices [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14]. With the rise of molecular electronics and nanoelectronics, intensive attention has been paid to exploiting the photovoltaic effect in molecular and nanoscale devices to realize various goals [45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53] From these previous studies, we know that for systems with spatial inversion symmetry, a finite detectable photocurrent is generated when a small auxiliary bias voltage is applied across the device to induce electronic asymmetry [46,47,48]. We consider two typical kinds of interconnects which are formed by connecting two identical ZGNRs with a carbon hexagon (C6) and a carbon tetragon (C4), respectively Both structures have anti-ferromagnetic zigzag edges and spatial inversion symmetry. The interconnects with a C6 provide perfect candidates for robustly producing pure spin current with PGE
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