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O: Fachverband Oberflächenphysik
O 7: Focussed Session: Frontiers of Electronic Structure Theory - Non-equilibrium Phenomena at the Nano-scale
O 7.4: Talk
Monday, March 31, 2014, 11:30–11:45, TRE Ma
Carbon nanotubes decorated with magnetic clusters: magnetism, electron transport and gas sensing — •Zeila Zanolli1 and Jean-Christophe Charlier2 — 1Forschungszentrum Juelich, PGI and IAS, Juelich, Germany — 2IMCN, Université catholique de Louvain (UCL), Belgium
In this work, first-principles techniques and non-equilibrium Green’s function approaches are used to investigate magnetism and spin-polarized quantum transport in carbon nanotubes (CNTs) decorated with transition metal magnetic nanoclusters (NC).
For small cluster sizes (< 1 nm), ab initio calculations predict a considerable local magnetic moment that induces spin polarization in the host CNT due to a strong mutual interaction with the magnetic NC. Such a huge local magnetic perturbation can be tailored by molecular adsorption on the metallic NC, thus modifying both the magnetization and the spin-dependent conductance of the hybrid CNT-NC system. The adsorption of benzene on Ni- or Pt-decorated metallic CNTs has been investigated as a test case. The ab initio simulations demonstrate that the magnetization change due to the absorption of a single C6H6 molecule should be large enough to be detected experimentally using either magnetic-AFM or SQUID magnetometer. Consequently, the present research suggests a novel approach for single molecule gas detection, based on local magnetic moment measurements in CNT-NC hybrid systems [1].
[1] Z. Zanolli, J.-C. Charlier, ACSnano 6 (2012) 10786-10791.