Antiparallel Spin Polarization Research Articles

Spin-polarization and Coulomb interaction dependent thermal rectification in a quantum dot system

Based on the master equation approach, we investigate the thermal transport through a diode composed of a quantum dot under Coulomb interaction and tunnel-coupled to two ferromagnetic leads with antiparallel spin polarizations. We analyze the effects of spin polarizations, Coulomb interaction, mean temperature and Zeeman splitting on the thermal rectification. Firstly, we find that the thermal rectification effect is enhanced with the increase of spin polarization, because the mirror-symmetry of the system is broken by the anti-parallel spin polarization. Especially, when both leads are fully spin polarized, the asymmetry of the heat transferred by Coulomb interaction under the opposite temperature bias leads to the appearance of perfect thermal rectification and negative differential thermal conductance. Secondly, we find whether the system is in a Coulomb blockade state greatly affects the thermal rectification coefficient. As the average temperature increases or the intradot Coulomb interaction decreases, the system gradually escapes from the Coulomb blockade state, resulting in a reversal of the thermal rectification direction and ultimately leading to an increase in the rectification coefficient. Thirdly, we also find that the Zeeman splitting can be utilized to modulate the behavior of thermal rectification. Thermal rectification occurs only when Zeeman splitting and spin polarization coexist, and under different spin polarizations, the rectification coefficient exhibits different trends with the change of Zeeman splitting. These observations indicate that this structure holds potential application at a thermal rectifier as well as a thermal detector of magnetic fields.

Antiparallel Spin Polarization and Spin Current Induced by Thermal Current and Locally Broken Inversion Symmetry in a Double‐Quantum Well Structure

Generating a nonequilibrium spin polarization with a driving force is first realized by the electric current in a system with broken inversion symmetry and extended to that induced by the thermal current and that appearing in an inversion‐symmetric system with locally broken inversion symmetry. This article theoretically explores the spin polarization generated by the thermal current and the locally broken inversion symmetry in a symmetric double‐quantum well structure (DQWS). This thermally induced spin polarization (TISP) appears in the antiparallel configuration with the TISP of two wells in opposite directions. The calculation using the Boltzmann equation in the relaxation‐time approximation under the condition of zero charge current shows that the local TISP exhibits the maximum at a finite Rashba spin–orbit interaction when the electron density is fixed. This is because the local TISP in the DQWS is enhanced at the chemical potential near the bottom of the first‐excited sub‐band. This enhancement also occurs in a single quantum well with globally broken inversion symmetry. Another finding is that the maximum of the local TISP appears at a nonzero interwell coupling. The spin current by the diffusion of the local TISP into an adjacent electrode is also calculated.

Antiparallel Spin Polarization Induced by Current in a Bilayer

The antiparallel current‐induced spin polarization (CISP) in an inversion‐symmetric double‐quantum‐well structure with the antiparallel Rashba effective magnetic field is calculated by solving the Boltzmann equation which is derived for the distribution operator in layer‐pseudospin space in the relaxation‐time approximation. The antiparallel CISP in an analytical form, obtained for constant momentum relaxation time in the limit of large Fermi energy, exhibits factor‐two increase with increasing the interlayer‐tunneling strength. This increase originates from the correction (to the semiclassical CISP) created by the subband mixing due to the momentum dependence of the Rashba effective magnetic field. The present interlayer‐coupling dependence of the antiparallel CISP is successfully explained as the layer‐pseudospin Hanle effect in which the spin in the original Hanle effect is replaced by the layer pseudospin. The present finding suggests that the correction by band mixing can be significant in the transport properties of various systems with the momentum‐dependent effective magnetic field.

Electric-Field-Effect Spin Switching with an Enhanced Number of Highly Polarized Electron and Photon Spins Using p-Doped Semiconductor Quantum Dots.

Electric-field-effect spin switching with an enhanced number of highly polarized electron and photon spins has been demonstrated using p-doped semiconductor quantum dots (QDs). Remote p-doping in InGaAs QDs tunnel-coupled with an InGaAs quantum well (QW) significantly increased the circularly polarized, thus electron-spin-polarized, photoluminescence intensity, depending on the electric-field-induced electron spin injection from the QW as a spin reservoir into the QDs. The spin polarity and polarization degree during this spin injection can be controlled by the direction and the strength of the electric field, where the spin direction can be reversed by excess electron spin injection into the QDs via spin scattering at the QD excited states. We found that the maximum degrees of both parallel and antiparallel spin polarization to the initial spin direction in the QW can be enhanced by p-doping. The doped holes without spin polarization can effectively contribute to this electric-field-effect spin switching after the initial electron spin injection selectively removes the parallel hole spins. The optimized p-doping induces fast spin reversals at the QD excited states with a moderate electric-field application, resulting in an efficient electric-field-driven antiparallel spin injection into the QD ground state. Further excess hole doping prevents this efficient spin reversal due to multiple electron–hole spin scattering, in addition to a spin-state filling effect at the QD excited states, during the spin injection from the QW into the QDs.

Hybridization effects on persistent currents in rings of topological insulators

Abstract We investigate spin dynamics and persistent charge and spin currents of electrons in rings of Topological Insulator (TI) thick and ultrathin films. Interesting effects are observed, in particular, precession of the tangential and longitudinal components of the spin transport is very small, while the radial component does not precess and thus behaves as a conserved quantity in the system dynamics. Further, we find that persistent charge current vanishes due to the equal and opposite contributions of the clockwise and counterclockwise propagating modes, whereas longitudinal spin polarized current vanishes due to the inversion symmetry along the cylindrical axis in both cases. Strikingly, the x- and y-components of spin polarized current oscillate with finite phase shift in the ring of thick film, whereas they vanish in the ring of ultrathin film due to the cancellation of antiparallel spin polarizations of the counterclockwise and clockwise propagating modes originated from the hybridization between the topologically protected conducting states of the outer and inner surfaces of the ring.

Measuring outcome correlation for Bell cat state and geometric phase induced spin parity effect

In terms of quantum probability statistics, the Bell inequality (BI) and its violation are extended to spin-[Formula: see text] entangled Schrödinger cat state (called the Bell cat state) with both parallel and antiparallel spin-polarizations. Except the spin-1/2, the BI is never ever violated by the Bell cat states with the measuring outcomes including entire Hilbert space. If, on the other hand, measuring outcomes are restricted in the subspace of spin coherent state (SCS), a universal Bell-type inequality (UBI), [Formula: see text], is formulated in terms of the local realistic model. We observe a spin parity effect that the UBI can be violated only by the Bell cat states of half-integer but not the integer spins. The violation of UBI is seen to be a direct result of nontrivial Berry phase between the SCSs of south- and north-pole gauges for half-integer spin, while the geometric phase is trivial for the integer spins. A maximum violation bound of UBI is found as [Formula: see text], which is valid for arbitrary half-integer spin-[Formula: see text] states.

A case study for the formation of stanene on a metal surface

The discovery and realization of graphene as an ideal two-dimensional (2D) material has triggered extensive efforts to create similar 2D materials with exciting spin-dependent properties. Here, we report on a novel Sn 2D superstructure on Au(111) that shows similarities and differences to the expected electronic features of ideal stanene. Using spin- and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, we find that a particular Sn/Au superstructure reveals a linearly dispersing band centered at the {bar{mathrm Gamma }}-point and below the Fermi level with anti-parallel spin polarization and a Fermi velocity of vF ≈ 1×106 m/s, the same value as for graphene. We attribute the origin of the band structure to the hybridization between the Sn and the Au orbitals at the 2D Sn-Au interface. Considering that free-standing stanene simply cannot exist, our investigated structure is an important step towards the search of useful stanene-like overstructures for future technological applications.

Spin-parity effect in violation of Bell’s inequalities for entangled states of parallel polarization

Bell’s inequalities (BIs) derived in terms of quantum probability statistics are extended to general bipartite-entangled states of arbitrary spins with parallel polarization. The original formula of Bell for the two-spin singlet is slightly modified in the parallel configuration, while the inequality formulated by Clauser–Horne–Shimony–Holt (CHSH) remains unchanged. The violation of BIs indeed resulted from the quantum nonlocal correlation for spin-[Formula: see text] case. However, the inequalities are always satisfied for the spin-1 entangled states regardless of parallel or antiparallel polarizations of two spins. The spin parity effect originally demonstrated with the antiparallel spin-polarizations (Z. Song, J.-Q. Liang and L.-F. Wei, Mod. Phys. Lett. B 28 (2013) 145004) still exists for the parallel case. The quantum nonlocality does not lead to the violation for integer spins due to the cancellation of nonlocal interference effects by the quantum statistical average. Again, the violation of BIs seems to be a result of the measurement-induced nontrivial Berry phase (BP) for half-integer spins.

Low voltage tunneling magnetoresistance in CuCrO2-based semiconductor heterojunctions at room temperature

CuCrO2-based heterojunction diodes with rectifying characteristics have been fabricated by combining p-type Mg-doped CuCrO2 and n-type Al-doped ZnO. It was found that the current for the heterojunction in low bias voltage region is dominated by the trap-assisted tunneling mechanism. Positive magnetoresistance (MR) effect for the heterojunction can be observed at room temperature due to the tunneling-induced antiparallel spin polarization near the heterostructure interface. The MR effect becomes enhanced with the magnetic field, and shows the maximum at a bias voltage around 0.5 V. The phenomena indicate that the CuCrO2-based heterojunction is a promising candidate for low-power semiconductor spintronic devices.

Strong spin-filtering and spin-valve effects in a molecular V-C(60)-V contact.

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.

Two-orbital Kondo effect in a quantum dot coupled to ferromagnetic leads

We study the Kondo effect of a two-orbital vertical quantum dot (QD) coupled to two ferromagnetic leads by employing an equation of motion method. When the ferromagnetic leads are coupled with parallel spin polarization, we find three peaks in the single-particle excitation spectra. The middle one is the Kondo resonance caused by the orbital degrees of freedom. In magnetic fields, the Kondo effect vanishes. However, at a certain magnetic field new twofold degenerate states arise and the Kondo effect emerges there. In contrast, when the ferromagnetic leads are coupled with antiparallel spin polarization, the Kondo effect caused by the spin (orbital) degrees of freedom survives (is suppressed) in magnetic fields. We investigate the field dependence of the conductance in the parallel and antiparallel spin polarizations of the leads and find that the conductance changes noticeably in magnetic fields.

Magnetoresistance of graphene-based spin valves

We study the magnetoresistance of spin-valve devices using graphene as a nonmagnetic material to connect ferromagnetic leads. As a preliminary step, we first study the conductivity of a graphene strip connected to metallic contacts for a variety of lead parameters and demonstrate that the resulting conductivity is rather insensitive to them. We then compute the conductivity of the spin-valve device in the parallel and antiparallel spin polarization configurations and find that it depends only weakly on the relative spin orientations of the leads, so that the magnetoresistance (MR) of the system is very small. The smallness of MR is a consequence of the near independence of the graphene conductivity from the electronic details of the leads. Our results indicate that, although graphene has properties that make it attractive for spintronic devices, the performance of a graphene-based spin-valve is likely to be poor.

Observing Spin Polarization of Individual Magnetic Adatoms

We have used spin-polarized scanning tunneling spectroscopy to observe the spin polarization state of individual Fe and Cr atoms adsorbed onto Co nanoislands. These magnetic adatoms exhibit stationary out-of-plane spin polarization, but have opposite sign of the exchange coupling between electron states of the adatom and the Co island surface state: Fe adatoms exhibit parallel spin polarization to the Co surface state while Cr adatoms exhibit antiparallel spin polarization. First-principles calculations predict ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic alignment of the spin moment for individual Fe and Cr adatoms on a Co film, respectively, implying negative spin polarization for Fe and Cr adatoms over the energy range of the Co surface state.

Attractive Interactions of Spin Polarons in the Quasi-One-Dimensional Spin-Density-Wave Background

Abstract The dynamics of spin polarons (spin bags) in the quasi-one- dimensional spin-density-wave background is numerically studied using the extended Peierls-Hubbard model. Interchain couplings are incorporated to the model as a staggered magnetic field. Time-dependent unrestricted Hartree-Fock equations and Newtonian equations are solved using Suzuki's decomposition of exponential operators. In the Hubbard model, the spin polarons with antiparallel spin polarizations attract each other. When the nearest-neighbor Coulomb repulsion is included, the interaction changes to a repulsive type. Further addition of an intersite electron-phonon coupling leads to an attractive interaction.

Antiparallel Spin Polarization in Triplet States

Antiparallel Spin Polarization in Triplet States