Speaker: Pino D'Amico - Cnr Nano
ONLINE: https://www.nano.cnr.it/NanoColloquia
Transparent Conductors (TCs) exhibit optical transparency and electron conductivity, and are essential for many opto-electronic and photo-voltaic devices. The most common TCs are electron-doped oxides, which are limited in the choice of possible dopants, as transition metals most often are not suitable, in wiev of their tendency to form strong oxygen bonds. Non-oxides TCs have the potential of extending the class of materials to the magnetic realm, bypass technological bottolenecks, and bring TCs to the field of spintronics. Here we propose new functional materials that combine transparency and conductivity with magnetic spin polarization that can be used for spintronic applications, such as spin filters. By using high-throughput first-principles approaches [1, 2, 3], we identified a large number of potential TCs, including non-oxides materials. Our results indicate that proper doping with transition metals introduces a finite magnetization that can provide spin filtering up to 90% in the electrical conductivity, still maintaining a transparency greater than 90% [4].
References
[1] P. D’Amico et al., Accurate ab initio tight-binding Hamiltonians: Effective tools for electronic transport and optical spectroscopy from first principles. Phys. Rev. B 94, 165166 (2016).
[2] A. R. Supka et al., AFLOWπ: A minimalist approach to high-throughput ab initio calculations including the generation of tight-binding hamiltonians. Comp. Mater. Sci. 136, 76-84 (2017).
[3] P. Giannozzi et al., Advanced capabilities for materials modelling with Quantum ESPRESSO. J. Phys. Cond. Mat. 29, 465901 (2017).
[4] P. D’Amico et al., Magnetic transparent conductors for spintronic applications. Acta Materialia 289, 120850 (2025).
This seminar is realized in the framework of the funded project
- Open Model | Integrated Open Access Materials Modelling Innovation Platform for Europe (GA 953167).