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Electrically controllable conductance and tunneling magnetoresistance through a topological insulator quantum well coupled to ferromagnetic electrodes

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Abstract

We theoretically investigate the electrically controllable conductance and tunneling magnetoresistance (TMR) through a two-dimensional topological insulator (TI) quantum well sandwiched between ferromagnetic (FM) electrodes in the method of nonequilibrium Green’s function (GF). It is demonstrated that the inter-edge tunnelings modulated conductance for spin-up and spin-down carriers presents an opposite tend with the polarization of the FM electrodes. The system TMR from the spin-valve effect is observed to be up to 65,000 %, as can be significantly suppressed and enhanced by the backscattering and spin-dephasing effect of the inter-edge spin-conserving and spin-flipping tunneling, respectively, other than the quite different energy-dependent oscillation behavior. The obtained results may provide a deeper understanding of the TI edge states and be used to design a dissipationless spintronic device based on TIs.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 11264013, 11264011 and 11147021), the Hunan Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 12JJ4003), and the Research Program for employee of Jishou University (Grant No. jsdxkyzz201005).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Physics, Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Jishou University, Jishou, 416000, China

    Junji Guo, Hairui Bao, Wenhu Liao & Heping Zhao

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  1. Junji Guo
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  2. Hairui Bao
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  3. Wenhu Liao
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  4. Heping Zhao
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Correspondence to Wenhu Liao.

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Guo, J., Bao, H., Liao, W. et al. Electrically controllable conductance and tunneling magnetoresistance through a topological insulator quantum well coupled to ferromagnetic electrodes. Appl. Phys. A 117, 1025–1029 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00339-014-8492-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00339-014-8492-2

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