Mechanically Induced Thermal Breakdown in Magnetic Shuttle Structures

Abstract

A theory of a thermally induced single-electron "shuttling" instability in a magnetic nanomechanical device subject to an external magnetic field is presented in the Coulomb blockade regime of electron transport. The model magnetic shuttle device considered comprises a movable metallic grain suspended between two magnetic leads, which are kept at different temperatures and assumed to be fully spin polarized with antiparallel magnetizations. For a given temperature difference shuttling is found to occur for a region of external magnetic fields between a lower and an upper critical field strength, which separate the shuttling regime from normal small-amplitude "vibronic" regimes. We find that (i) the upper critical magnetic field saturates to a constant value in the high temperature limit and that the shuttle instability domain expands with a decrease of the temperature, (ii) the lower critical magnetic field depends not only on the temperature independent phenomenological friction coefficient used in the model but also on intrinsic friction (which vanishes in the high temperature limit) caused by magnetic exchange forces and electron tunneling between the quantum dot and the leads. The feasibility of using thermally driven magnetic shuttle systems to harvest thermal breakdown phenomena is discussed.

arXiv comment9 pages, 2 figures

References in corpus (8)

• Quantum Thermodynamics
• Fundamental aspects of steady-state conversion of heat to work at the nanoscale
• Shuttle Mechanism for Charge Transfer in Coulomb Blockade Nanostructures
• Thermal Conductance of a Single-Electron Transistor
• Quantum Shuttle Phenomena in a Nanoelectromechanical Single-Electron Transistor
• Vibrational Instability due to Coherent Tunneling of Electrons
• Quantum Description of Shuttle Instability in Nanoelectromechanical Single Electron Transistor
• Cooling of nanomechanical resonator by thermally activated single-electron transport

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Coulomb-promoted spintromechanics in magnetic shuttle devices
• Cooling of nanomechanical vibrations by Andreev injection
• Spin-Polaronic Effects in Electric Shuttling in a Single Molecule Transistor with Magnetic Leads
• Nanomechanics driven by the superconducting proximity effect
• Helicon plasma in a magnetic shuttle