Abstract
Motivated by the recent achievements in the manipulation of C60 molecules in STM experiments, we study theoretically the structure and electronic properties of a C60 molecule in an STM tunneljunction with a magnetic tip and magnetic adatom on a Cu(111) surface using first-principles calculations. For the case of a vanadium tip/adatom, we demonstrate how spin coupling between the magnetic V atoms, mediated by the C60, can be observed in the electronic transport, which display a strong spin-filtering effect, allowing mainly majority-spin electrons to pass (>95%). Moreover, we find a significant change in the conductance between parallel and anti-parallel spin polarizations in the junction (86%) which suggests that STM experiments should be able to characterize the magnetism and spin coupling for these systems.
Highlights
Organic materials typically offer small spin–orbit and hyperfine interactions, which are prerequisites for spintronic applications, because they allow long spin lifetimes
There is a great interest in organic building blocks for molecular spintronics [1,2,3,4], and a thorough understanding of spin transport and magnetism in these systems is called for
It is important to establish model molecular spintronic systems where spin transport and magnetic interactions can be examined experimentally. It has been demonstrated in low temperature scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) experiments how C60 molecules can be picked up by the STM-tip, and how they could controllably be used to contact structures such as adatoms, clusters, and molecules placed on a substrate surface [5,6,7]
Summary
Organic materials typically offer small spin–orbit and hyperfine interactions, which are prerequisites for spintronic applications, because they allow long spin lifetimes. It is important to establish model molecular spintronic systems where spin transport and magnetic interactions can be examined experimentally. Direct magnetic interactions between STM tip and magnetic materials on a substrate have been studied in a number of works [18,19,20], and STM has been used to probe spin in organic molecules [21].
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