Quantized Conductance through a Spin-Selective Atomic Point Contact.

Abstract

We implement a microscopic spin filter for cold fermionic atoms in a quantum point contact (QPC) and create fully spin-polarized currents while retaining conductance quantization. Key to our scheme is a near-resonant optical tweezer inducing a large effective Zeeman shift inside the QPC while its local character limits dissipation. We observe a renormalization of this shift due to interactions of only a few atoms in the QPC. Our work represents the analog of an actual spintronic device and paves the way to studying the interplay between spin splitting and interactions far from equilibrium.