Suspended nanowires as mechanically-controlled Rashba spin-splitters

Abstract

Suspended nanowires are shown to provide mechanically-controlled coherent mixing/splitting of the spin states of transmitted electrons, caused by the Rashba spin-orbit interaction. The sensitivity of the latter to mechanical bending makes the wire a tunable nano-electro-mechanical (NEM) weak link between reservoirs. When the reservoirs are populated with misbalanced "spin up/down" electrons, the wire becomes a source of split spin currents, which are not associated with electric charge transfer and which do not depend on temperature or driving voltages. The mechanical vibrations of the bended wires allow for additional tunability of these splitters by applying a magnetic field and varying the temperature. Clean metallic carbon nanotubes of a few microns length are good candidates for generating spin conductance of the same order as the charge conductance (divided by $e^2$) which would have been induced by electric driving voltages.

5 pages, 2 figures

References in corpus (8)

• Spin-orbit coupling in curved graphene, fullerenes, nanotubes, and nanotube caps
• Coupling of Spin and Orbital Motion of Electrons in Carbon Nanotubes
• Demonstration of Entanglement of Electrostatically Coupled Singlet-Triplet Qubits
• Spin-orbit interaction and anomalous spin relaxation in carbon nanotube quantum dots
• Bends In Nanotubes Allow Electric Spin Control and Coupling
• Coherent, mechanical control of a single electronic spin
• Spin-orbit interaction in chiral carbon nanotubes probed in pulsed magnetic fields
• Electronic Aharonov-Bohm Effect Induced by Quantum Vibrations

Cited by in corpus (12)

• Rashba splitting of Cooper pairs
• Control of the Two-Electron Exchange Interaction in a Nanowire Double Quantum Dot
• Mechanically-controlled spin-selective transport
• Spin-mediated photomechanical coupling of a nanoelectromechanical shuttle
• Photovoltaic effect generated by spin-orbit interactions
• Effects of magnetic fields on the Datta-Das spin field-effect transistor
• Magnetization generated by microwave-induced Rashba interaction
• Effects of different lead magnetizations on the Datta-Das spin field-effect transistor
• Rashba spin-splitting of single electrons and Cooper pairs
• Spin precession in spin-orbit coupled weak links: Coulomb repulsion and Pauli quenching
• Photo-spintronics of spin-orbit active electric weak links
• Rashba proximity states in superconducting tunnel junctions