Transport through graphene-like flakes with intrinsic spin orbit interactions

TL;DR

This paper investigates how intrinsic spin-orbit interactions influence edge magnetism, conductance, and shot noise in finite graphene-like flakes within the Coulomb blockade regime, revealing modifications in transport properties and magnetic configurations.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of edge magnetism and transport in graphene-like flakes considering intrinsic spin-orbit effects, which was not thoroughly explored before.

Findings

In-plane magnetic moments modify Coulomb blockade diamonds.

Intrinsic spin-orbit interaction alters Coulomb blockade features.

Edge magnetism is strongly influenced by spin-orbit coupling.

Abstract

It has been shown recently [J. L. Lado et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 027203 (2014)] that edge magnetic moments in graphene-like nanoribbons are strongly influenced by the intrinsic spin-orbit interaction. Due to this interaction an anisotropy comes about which makes the in-plane arrangement of magnetic moments energetically more favorable than that corresponding to the out-of-plane configuration. In this paper we raise both the edge magnetism problem as well as differential conductance and shot noise Fano factor issues, in the context of finite-size flakes within the Coulomb blockade (CB) transport regime. Our findings elucidate the following problems: (i) modification of the CB diamonds by the appearance of the in-plane magnetic moments, (ii) modification of the CB diamonds by intrinsic spin-orbit interaction.