The magnetism and spin-dependent electronic transport properties of boron nitride atomic chains

Very recently, boron nitride atomic chains were successively prepared and observed in experiments [O. Cretu et al., ACS Nano 8, 11950 (2015)]. Herein, using a first-principles technique, we study the magnetism and spin-dependent electronic transport properties of three types of BN atomic chains whose magnetic moment is 1 μ B for BnNn−1, 2 μ B for BnNn, and 3 μ B for BnNn+1 type atomic chains, respectively. The spin-dependent electronic transport results demonstrate that the short BnNn+1 chain presents an obvious spin-filtering effect with high spin polarization ratio (>90%) under low bias voltages. Yet, this spin-filtering effect does not occur for long BnNn+1 chains under high bias voltages and other types of BN atomic chains (BnNn−1 and BnNn). The proposed short BnNn+1 chain is predicted to be an effective low-bias spin filters. Moreover, the length-conductance relationships of these BN atomic chains were also studied.