Bending strain engineering in quantum spin hall system for controlling spin currents.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 28621307.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/ncomms15850 and PMC identifier 5481753.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Quantum spin Hall system can exhibit exotic spin transport phenomena, mediated by its topological edge states. Here the concept of bending strain engineering to tune the spin transport properties of a quantum spin Hall system is demonstrated. We show that bending strain can be used to control the spin orientation of counter-propagating edge states of a quantum spin system to generate a non-zero spin current. This physics mechanism can be applied to effectively tune the spin current and pure spin current decoupled from charge current in a quantum spin Hall system by control of its bending curvature. Furthermore, the curved quantum spin Hall system can be achieved by the concept of topological nanomechanical architecture in a controllable way, as demonstrated by the material example of Bi/Cl/Si(111) nanofilm. This concept of bending strain engineering of spins via topological nanomechanical architecture affords a promising route towards the realization of topological nano-mechanospintronics.