Ground-state spin blockade in a single-molecule junction

Abstract

It is known that the quantum-mechanical ground state of a nano-scale junction has a significant impact on its electrical transport properties. This becomes particularly important in transistors consisting of a single molecule. Due to strong electron-electron interactions and the possibility to access ground states with high spins, these systems are eligible hosts of a current-blockade phenomenon called ground-state spin blockade. This effect arises from the inability of a charge carrier to account for the spin difference required to enter the junction, as that process would violate the spin selection rules. Here, we present a direct experimental demonstration of ground-state spin blockade in a high-spin single-molecule transistor. The measured transport characteristics of this device exhibit a complete suppression of resonant transport due to a ground-state spin difference of 3/2 between subsequent charge states. Strikingly, the blockade can be reversibly lifted by driving the system through a magnetic ground-state transition in one charge state, using the tunability offered by both magnetic and electric fields.

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Cited by in corpus (9)

• Advances and challenges in single-molecule electron transport
• Green's function methods for single molecule junctions
• Controlling the entropy of a single-molecule junction
• Magnetic Field Universality of the Kondo Effect Revealed by Thermocurrent Spectroscopy
• Single-electron transport in a molecular Hubbard dimer
• Efficient heating of single-molecule junctions for thermoelectric studies at cryogenic temperatures
• Magnetoresistance and spintronic anisotropy induced by spin excitations along molecular spin chains
• Time-dependent spintronic anisotropy in magnetic molecules
• Mean Field Decoupling of Single Impurity Anderson Model through Auxiliary Majorana Fermions