Eur. Phys. J. B (2014) 87: 106
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2014-50073-9

Regular Article

Magnetization transfer by a quantum ring device

¹ Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Roma Tor Vergata, Via della Ricerca Scientifica 1, 00133 Rome, Italy
² Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare – Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati , Via E. Fermi 40, 00044 Frascati, Italy

^a e-mail: michele.cini@roma2.infn.it
^b e-mail: bellucci@lnf.infn.it

Received: 31 January 2014
Received in final form: 29 March 2014
Published online: 8 May 2014

Abstract

We show that a tight-binding model device consisting of a laterally connected ring at half filling in a tangent time-dependent magnetic field can in principle be designed to pump a purely spin current. The process exploits the spin-orbit interaction in the ring. This behavior is understood analytically and found to be robust with respect to temperature and small deviations from half filling.