Spin- and valley-dependent transports through ferromagnetic 8-pmmn borophene monolayer

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that an 8-pmmn borophene monolayer n-p-n junction can serve as a perfect spin and valley filter, controllable via gate voltage and Fermi energy, leveraging its unique anisotropic Dirac cones.

Contribution

It introduces a borophene-based device capable of full spin and valley polarization, exploiting its intrinsic anisotropic and tilted Dirac cones for spintronic and valleytronic applications.

Findings

Exchange magnetic field induces spin polarization.

Gate voltage causes valley polarization due to anisotropic Dirac cones.

Barrier length > 60nm achieves full spin and valley polarization.

Abstract

We study spin and valley-dependent transport properties in an n-p-n junction of 8-pmmn borophene monolayer. An external gate voltage and exchange magnetic field, induced by the proximity effect of a ferromagnetic insulator, are applied to this junction as electric and magnetic potential barriers. We show that the exchange magnetic field generates spin polarization in the system and applying a gate voltage, as a simple method, causes valley polarization. This property (valley polarization) is due to the anisotropic and tilted Dirac cones of the borophene structure. It is an advantage of borophene monolayer over graphene monolayer because in graphene it is necessary to apply strain to have valley polarization. We also show that the proposed device (borophene-based n-p-n junction) can work as perfect spin and perfect valley filters. The spin and valley filters can be controlled by changing two factors, i.e. gate voltage and Fermi energy. Moreover, it is shown that for full spin and valley polarizations and thus perfect spin and valley filters, the length of the barriers must be larger than a specific value (60nm). These results show that the borophene monolayer has a suitable potential to be used in spintronic and valleytronic devices.