1. Introduction
The concept “spintronics” has attracted considerable scientific interest in recent years, and it has now been igniting a revolution in computer science, information science, and other areas [1-4]. The “half-metallic” material, a new class of compound, whose electrical current can be completely spin polarized, has been considered a good candidate for spintronic applications due to the coexistence of the metallic nature for electrons with one spin orientation and an semiconductor or insulating nature for the other spin orientation. In view of the potential for use of this property in designing spin-based electronics, searching for half-metallic materials has become a hot topic ever since de Groot et al. theoretically predicted that the Hesuler compound (NiMnSb) exhibit half-metallic nature in 1983 [5]. The half-metallic behavior has been reported in three-dimensional materials such as manganese perovskites [6] Zinc-blende (ZB) (such as CrAs and CrSb in ZB structure), Fe3O4 and CrO2 [6]. Interestingly, the half-metallic behavior has been predicted for two-dimensional graphene nanoribbons in the presence of external electric field [7], which opens a new path to explore spintronics at the nanometers scale.
A challenge for technological applications at the nanosclae is to find half metallic behavior in one-dimensional structures. To this regard, Xiang [8] and Maslyuk [9] have independently observed that the one-dimensional organometallic manganese- and vanadium-benzene nanowires exhibit half-metallic nature. An attractive point is that the finite zigzag carbon nanotube (CNT) itself has been shown to possess half-metallic behavior in the presence of electric field [10-14]. In addition, recent studies have shown that half-metallicity might be induced to the functionalized boron nitride (BN) systems, such as fully bare BN nanoribbons [15] and the BN nanotubes filled with Ni cluster [16].
In this letter, we theoretically propose an alternative strategy to achieve the half-metallic behavior by simply encapsulating small molecules with unpaired electrons (including NO, NO2, and O2) inside zigzag CNTs. The advantage of the proposed strategy is that 1) the structural integrality of CNT can be well preserved, and 2) the encapsulated small molecules are stable and easily manipulated. To our knowledge, no prior theoretical study has been reported on this issue.
请问1楼是用翻译软件翻译的吗？
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