Photon-gated spin transistor

Abstract

Spin-polarized field-effect transistor (spin-FET), where a dielectric layer is generally employed for the electrical gating as the traditional FET, stands out as a seminal spintronic device under the miniaturization trend of electronics. It would be fundamentally transformative if optical gating was used for spin-FET. We report a new type of spin-polarized field-effect transistor (spin-FET) with optical gating, which is fabricated by partial exposure of the (La,Sr)MnO3 channel to light-emitting diode (LED) light. The manipulation of the channel conductivity is ascribed to the enhanced scattering of the spin-polarized current by photon-excited antiparallel aligned spins. And the photon-gated spin-FET shows strong light power dependence and reproducible enhancement of resistance under light illumination, indicting well-defined conductivity cycling features. Our finding would enrich the concept of spin-FET and promote the use of optical means in spintronics for low power consumption and ultrafast data processing.

16 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (7)

• Black phosphorus field-effect transistors
• Field-effect tunneling transistor based on vertical graphene heterostructures
• All-optical control of ferromagnetic thin films and nanostructures
• All-electric all-semiconductor spin field effect transistors
• Spin Hall effect transistor
• Reversal of spin polarization in Fe/GaAs (001) driven by resonant surface states: First-principles calculations
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