A selfconsistent calculation of the transport properties of a double barrier spin filter

• Autor(a) principal: Makler,S. S.
• Data de Publicação: 2006
• Outros Autores: Ritter,C. F., Lima,I. C. da Cunha
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Brazilian Journal of Physics
• Texto Completo: http://old.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0103-97332006000300069
• topic: Transport properties; Double barrier spin filter; Tight-binding Hamiltonian

A double barrier resonant tunneling device in which the well is made of a semi-magnetic material can work as an efficient spin filter. Today it is possible to make semiconductors that are ferromagnetic at room temperature. Therefore the device studied here has a great potential to be used as a polarizer, an analyzer and other spintronic applications. We discuss here the case of a Ga1-xMn xAs/Ga1-yAl yAs system because it can be integrated into the well known AlGaAs/GaAs technology. Our tight-binding Hamiltonian includes the kinetic energy, the double-barrier profile, the electric field, the magnetic term, the hole-impurity and the hole-hole interactions. The profile and the charge distribution are calculated self-consistently. In previous works we studied this system by solving the Hamiltonian in the reciprocal space, in order to simplify the treatment of the Poisson equation for the charge distribution. Here we introduce a simple one dimensional Green function that permits to solve all terms in the real space. Besides, a real space renormalization formalism is used to calculate exactly the electronic currents for each spin polarization. The results confirm that the proposed system is a good device for spintronics.