English

Altermagnetic Schottky Contact

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2023-10-18 v1 Materials Science Applied Physics

Abstract

Altermagnet is an emerging antiferromagnetic material subclass that exhibits spin-splitting in momentum space without net global magnetization and spin-orbit-coupling effect. In this work, we develop a model of thermal charge injection across an altermagnet/semiconductor (AM/S) Schottky contact. We obtain analytical expressions describing the spin-dependent thermionic current injection across the AM/S contact under any arbitrary interface orientation angles. Interestingly, the spin-contrasting Fermi surface of an altermagnetic electrode enables spin-polarized current to be injected into a nonmagnetic semiconductor even though the system has net-zero magnetization. Our findings thus reveal an altermagntic mechanism to achieve spin injection without involving ferromagnetic ordering. The AM/S Schottky contact proposed here shall provide a potential altermagnetic building block of spintronic devices that are resilient against stray magnetic field perturbation and inherently compatible with ultracompact integration.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2310.11289,
  title  = {Altermagnetic Schottky Contact},
  author = {Yee Sin Ang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.11289},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

8 pages, 3 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T12:53:24.031Z