Abstract
The transmission through a magnetic layer of correlated electrons sandwiched between noninteracting normal‐metal leads is studied within model calculations. The linear regime in the framework of the Meir–Wingreen formalism is considered, according to which the transmission can be interpreted as the overlap of the spectral function of the surface layer of the leads with that of the central region. By analyzing these spectral functions, it is shown that a change in the coupling parameter between the leads and the central region significantly and nontrivially affects the conductance. The role of band structure effects for the transmission is clarified. For a strong coupling between the leads and the central layer, high‐intensity localized states are formed outside the overlapping bands, while for weaker coupling this high‐intensity spectral weight is formed within the leads’ continuum band around the Fermi energy. A local Coulomb interaction in the central region modifies the high‐intensity states, and therefore the transmission. For the present setup, the major effect of the local interaction consists in shifts of the band structure because any sharp features are weakened due to the macroscopic extension of the layers.
Highlights
The transmission through a magnetic layer of correlated electrons sandwiched between noninteracting normal-metal leads is studied within model calculations
We study a one-band generic model to discuss the physics of transmission through metallic hetero-structures
This model consists of two noninteracting leads sandwiching a central region that can be subject to local Coulomb interactions
Summary
The electronic transport through a device can be conveniently addressed by applying scattering theory, which was pioneered by Landauer[21,22] and Büttiker,[23,24] and worked out in detail by Meir and Wingreen.[25]. The couplings are turned on adiabatically, assuming time-reversal invariance.[27,28] In the following, we apply the Meir–Wingreen approach[25] to our heterostructure setup, in which electronic correlations are considered in the scattering region only, i.e., in the central layer. Using the Meir–Wingreen formalism, we can replace the scattering region Green’s function directly by its interacting counterpart, in which electronic correlations are taken into account by the local self-energy ΣðωÞ. This latter quantity is computed using the recently developed fork tensor-product states (FTPS) solver[29]; we used this method recently to describe the spectral properties of heterostructures containing half-metals.[30]. We discuss the behavior of the spin dependency of the spectral functions, and contrast it with the spindependent transmissions, when varying the hopping to/from the central region, as well as the strength of the local interaction on the central layer
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