Chiral resistance effect in an organic helical heterojunction device

Abstract

Chiral-induced spin selectivity has stimulated the investigation of chiral electronics and spintronics. In this theoretical work, we propose chiral resistance (CR) in a heterojunction constituted by two adjacent molecules with different chiralities. We study chirality-dependent transport properties in such a non-magnetic helical heterojunction and find that chiral-induced spin–orbit coupling and chiral-induced spinterface will affect the electron transmission through the device and lead to large CR at low bias. We demonstrate the dependence of CR on the molecule length, the chirality-inversion ratio, and the chirality mismatch. Our studies are helpful to understand the transport properties in a helical heterojunction, and the proposed CR effect could be used to design future spintronics devices.