Ballistic conductance of Ni nanowire with a magnetization reversal

Abstract

The approach proposed by Choi and Ihm for calculating the ballistic conductance of open quantum systems is generalized to deal with magnetic transition metals. The method has been implemented with ultrasoft pseudopotentials and plane wave basis set in a DFT-LSDA ab-initio scheme. We present the quantum-mechanical conductance calculations for monatomic Ni nanowire with a single spin reversal. We find that a spin reversal blocks the conductance of $d$ electrons at the Fermi energy of the Ni nanowire. On the other hand, two $s$ electrons (one per each spin) are perfectly transmitted in the whole energy window giving $2G_0$ for the total conductance. The relevance of these results in connection with recent experimental data is discussed.

4 pages, 1 figure, to be published in Surface Science

References in corpus (3)

• Evidence of spontaneous spin polarized transport in magnetic nanowires
• First-principles phase-coherent transport in metallic nanotubes with realistic contacts
• Complex band structure with ultrasoft pseudopotentials: fcc Ni and Ni nanowire

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Metallic, Magnetic and Molecular Nanocontacts
• Anisotropic magnetoresistance in nanocontacts
• Efficient DFT+U calculations of ballistic electron transport: Application to Au monatomic chains with a CO impurity
• Interaction of a CO molecule with a Pt monatomic wire: electronic structure and ballistic conductance