All-electrical injection and detection of a spin polarized current using 1D conductors

Abstract

All-electrical control of spin transport in nanostructures has been the central interest and chal- lenge of spin physics and spintronics. Here we demonstrate on-chip spin polarizing/filtering actions by driving the gate-defined one dimensional (1D) conductor, one of the simplest geometries for integrated quantum devices, away from the conventional Ohmic regime. Direct measurement of the spin polarization of the emitted current was performed when the momentum degeneracy was lifted, wherein both the 1D polarizer for spin injection and the analyzer for spin detection were demonstrated. The results showed that a configuration of gates and applied voltages can give rise to a tunable spin polarization, which has implications for the development of spintronic devices and future quantum information processing.