Contact effects in spin transport along double-helical molecules

Abstract

We report on spin transport along double-helical molecular systems by considering various contact configurations and asymmetries between the two helical strands in the regime of completely coherent charge transport. Our results reveal that no spin polarization appears in two-terminal molecular devices when coupled to one-dimensional electrodes. The same holds in the case of finite-width electrodes if there is a \emph{bottleneck} of one single site in the system electrode--molecule--electrode. Then, additional dephasing is necessary to induce spin-filtering effects. In contrast, nonzero spin polarization is found in molecular devices with multiple terminals or with two finite-width electrodes, each of them connected to more than one site of the molecule. Then, the magnitude of spin polarization can be enhanced by increasing the asymmetry between the two strands. We point out that the spin-filtering effects could emerge in double-helical molecular devices at low temperature without dephasing by a proper choice of the electrode number and the connection between the molecule and the electrodes.

arXiv comment7 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (10)

• Spin-Selective Transport of Electron in DNA Double Helix
• Spin selective transport through helical molecular systems
• Chiral molecular films as electron polarizers and polarization modulators
• Induced spin filtering in electron transmission through chiral molecular layers adsorbed on metals with strong spin-orbit coupling
• Spontaneous spin-polarized current in a nonuniform Rashba interaction system
• Spin Sensitive Transmission Through Helical Potentials
• Tight-binding parameters for charge transfer along DNA
• Sequence-dependent spin-selective tunneling along double-stranded DNA
• Enhanced spin-polarized transport through DNA double helix by gate voltage
• Charge transfer via a two-strand superexchange bridge in DNA

Cited by in corpus (16)

• Advances and challenges in single-molecule electron transport
• Spin-Dependent Electron Transmission Model for Chiral Molecules in Mesoscopic Devices
• Role of Exchange Interactions in the Magnetic Response and Intermolecular Recognition of Chiral Molecules
• Effective Hamiltonian model for helically constrained quantum systems within adiabatic perturbation theory: application to the Chirality-Induced Spin Selectivity (CISS) Effect
• Giant chirality-induced spin-selectivity of polarons
• Many-Body Models for Chirality-Induced Spin Selectivity in Electron Transfer
• Interface-Induced Conservation of Momentum Leads to Chiral-Induced Spin Selectivity
• Spin filtering in all-electrical three-terminal interferometers
• Magnetochiral Charge Pumping due to Charge Trapping and Skin Effect in Chirality-Induced Spin Selectivity
• Spin dynamics in helical molecules with non-linear interactions
• Spin-dependent electron transport along hairpin-like DNA molecules
• Chiral solitons in a non-linear model of helical molecules
• Dynamical theory of chiral-induced spin selectivity in electron donor-chiral molecule-acceptor systems
• Spin-dependent Destructive Quantum Interference Associated with Chirality-induced Spin Selectivity in Circular Single Helix Molecules
• Spin-polarized electron transmission in DNA-like systems
• Contacts for organic switches with carbon-nanotube leads