Emergence of half-metallicity in suspended NiO chains

Abstract

Contrary to the antiferromagnetic and insulating character of bulk NiO, one-dimensional chains of this material can become half-metallic due to the lower coordination of their atoms. Here we present ab initio electronic structure and quantum transport calculations of ideal infinitely long NiO chains and of more realistic short ones suspended between Ni electrodes. While infinite chains are insulating, short suspended chains are half-metallic minority-spin conductors which display very large magnetoresistance and a spin-valve behaviour controlled by a single atom.

5 pages, 4 figures; accepted version; minor changes in introduction and references

References in corpus (3)

• Magnetic and orbital blocking in Ni nanocontacts
• Ballistic Conductance and Magnetism in Short Tip-Suspended Ni Nanowires
• Transport in magnetically ordered Pt nanocontacts

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Dynamical Mean-Field Theory for Molecular Electronics: Electronic Structure and Transport Properties
• Anisotropic magnetoresistance in nanocontacts
• Anomalous Conductance Oscillations and Half-Metallicity in Atomic Ag-O Chains
• Highly conductive and complete spin filtering of nickel atomic contacts in a nitrogen atmosphere
• Current shot noise in atomic contacts: Fe and FeH${}_2$ between Au electrodes
• Electronic structure and transport properties of atomic NiO spinvalves
• 1D Transition Metal Oxide Chains as a Challenging Model for Ab Initio Calculations