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.

arXiv comment5 pages, 4 figures; accepted version; minor changes in introduction and references

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Cited by in corpus (10)

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• Symmetry aspects of spin-filtering in molecular junctions: hybridization and quantum interference effects
• Anisotropic magnetoresistance in nanocontacts
• Conduction eigenchannels of atomic-sized contacts: Ab initio KKR Green's function formalism
• 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