Understanding Charge Transport in Triarylmethyl-Based Spintronic Nanodevices

In
this Article, we explore the potential of triarylmethyl (TAM)
oligomers as devices for organic molecular spintronic applications.
We use the Landauer formalism to compute global spin transport and
local current analysis to understand transport at finite bias voltages
within the nonequilibrium Green’s function framework and using
density functional theory calculations. Important variations of the
total spin current are observed in chlorinated TAM dimers as a function
of the electronic structure in the device. On the other hand, the
spin-resolved local transport mechanism and the geometry of the nanodevice
are found to depend weakly on the electronic structure, even at relatively
high voltages. Such dimers could potentially be used in transistor
applications. Further, devices based on chlorinated TAM monomers are
shown to possess strong differential spin-transport properties at
low bias voltage, a property that could be used for spin filtering.