1306.3318 (Zhi-Yun Tan et al.)

Conductance of Ferro- and Antiferro-magnetic single-atom contacts: A
first-principles study    [PDF]

Zhi-Yun Tan, Xiao-long Zheng, Xiang Ye, Yi-qun Xie, San-Huang Ke

We present a first-principles study on the spin denpendent conductance of five single-atom magnetic junctions consisting of a magnetic tip and an adatom adsorbed on a magnetic surface, i.e., the Co-Co/Co(001) and Ni-X/Ni(001) (X=Fe, Co, Ni, Cu) junctions. When their spin configuration changes from ferromagnetism to anti-ferromagnetism, the spin-up conductance increases while the spin-down one decreases. For the junctions with a magnetic adatom, there is nearly no spin valve effect as the decreased spin-down conductance counteracts the increased spin-up one. For the junction with a nonmagnetic adatom (Ni-Cu/Ni(001)), a spin valve effect is obtained with a variation of 22% in the total conductance. In addition, the change in spin configuration enhances the spin filter effect for the Ni-Fe/Ni(001) junction but suppresses it for the other junctions.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1306.3318