A Digital Switch and Femto-Tesla Magnetic Field Sensor Based on Fano Resonance in a Spin Field Effect Transistor

Abstract

We show that a Spin Field Effect Transistor, realized with a semiconductor quantum wire channel sandwiched between half-metallic ferromagnetic contacts, can have Fano resonances in the transmission spectrum. These resonances appear because the ferromagnets are half-metallic, so that the Fermi level can be placed above the majority but below the minority spin band. In that case, the majority spins will be propagating, but the minority spins will be evanescent. At low temperatures, the Fano resonances can be exploited to implement a digital binary switch that can be turned on or off with a very small gate voltage swing of few tens of microvolts, leading to extremely small dynamic power dissipation during switching. An array of 500,000 x 500,000 such transistors can detect ultrasmall changes in a magnetic field with a sensitivity of 1 femto-Tesla/sqrt{Hz}, if each transistor is biased near a Fano resonance.

References in corpus (7)

• Non-ballistic spin field-effect transistor
• Performance of a spin-based insulated gate field effect transistor
• Phase coherent quantum mechanical spin tranport in a weakly disordered quasi one-dimensional channel
• The Effect of Ramsauer Type Transmission Resonances on the Conductance Modulation of Spin Interferometers
• Ab-initio transport theory for digital ferromagnetic heterostructures
• Proposal for a spintronic femto-Tesla magnetic field sensor
• Magnetoelectric subbands and eigenstates in the presence of Rashba and Drresselhaus spin orbit interactions in a quantum wire

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Strongly modulated transmission of a spin-split quantum wire with local Rashba interaction
• Fano-Rashba effect in quantum dots
• A Dual Gate Spin Field Effect Transistor With Very Low Switching Voltage and Large ON-to-OFF Conductance Ratio
• Conductance oscillations of a spin-orbit stripe with polarized contacts