Ballistic Conductance and Magnetism in Short Tip-Suspended Ni Nanowires

Abstract

Electronic and transport properties of a short Ni nanowire suspended between two semi-infinite ferromagnetic Ni leads are explored in the framework of density-functional theory. The spin-dependent ballistic conductance of the nanowire is calculated using a scattering-based approach and the Landauer-Buttiker formula. The total calculated conductance in units of $G_0=2e^2/h$ is around 1.6, in fairly good agreement with the broad peak observed around 1.5 for the last conductance step in break junctions. Separating contributions from different spins, we find nearly 0.5 $G_0$ from the majority spin $s$-like channel, whereas the remaining minority spin conductance of 1.1 $G_0$ contains significant contributions from several $d$ states, but much less than 0.5 $G_0$ from $s$ states. The influence of the structural relaxation on the magnetic properties and the ballistic conductance of the nanowire is also studied.

9 pages, 7 figures, to appear in PRB

References in corpus (2)

• Magnetic and orbital blocking in Ni nanocontacts
• Magnetoresistance of atomic-sized contacts: an ab-initio study

Cited by in corpus (6)

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• Theoretical study of the conductance of ferromagnetic atomic-sized contacts
• Quantized Conductance of a Single Magnetic Atom
• Electronic transport in iron atomic contacts: from the infinite wire to realistic geometries
• Emergence of half-metallicity in suspended NiO chains
• Statistical analysis of Ni nanowires breaking processes: a numerical simulation study