All-Electrical Generation of Spin-Polarized Currents in Quantum Spin Hall Insulators

Abstract

The control and generation of spin-polarized currents (SPCs) without magnetic materials and external magnetic field is a big challenge in spintronics and normally requires spin-flip mechanism. In this work, we propose a novel method to control and generate SPCs in stanene nanoribbons in the quantum spin Hall (QSH) insulator regime by all electrical means without spin-flip mechanism. This is achieved with intrinsic spin-orbit coupling in stanene nanoribbons by tuning the relative phase of spin up and down electrons using a gate voltage, which creates a time delay between them thereby producing alternative SPCs driven by ac voltage. The control and generation of SPCs are demonstrated numerically for ac transport in both transient and ac regime. Our results are robust against edge imperfections and generally valid for other QSH insulators such as silicene and germanene, etc. These findings establish a novel route for generating SPCs by purely electrical means and open the door for new applications of semiconductor spintronics.

arXiv comment5 pages, 4 figures

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• A many-body approach to transport in quantum systems: From the transient regime to the stationary state
• Spin-valley polarized edge states and quantum anomalous Hall states controlled by side potential in 2D honeycomb lattices
• Electron spin inversion in gated silicene nanoribbons
• Quantum nonlinear ac transport theory at low frequency
• High-Throughput Discovery of Two-Dimensional Materials Exhibiting Strong Rashba-Edelstein effect