The magnetism and spin-dependent electronic transport properties of boron nitride atomic chains.

Very recently, boron nitride atomic chains were successively prepared and observed in experiments [O. Cretu et al., ACS Nano 8, 11950 (2015)]. Herein, using a first-principles technique, we study the magnetism and spin-dependent electronic transport properties of three types of BN atomic chains whose magnetic moment is 1 µ_B for B_nN_n-1, 2 µ_B for B_nN_n, and 3 µ_B for B_nN_n+1 type atomic chains, respectively. The spin-dependent electronic transport results demonstrate that the short BnNn+1 chain presents an obvious spin-filtering effect with high spin polarization ratio (>90%) under low bias voltages. Yet, this spin-filtering effect does not occur for long BnNn+1 chains under high bias voltages and other types of BN atomic chains (B_nN_n-1 and B_nN_n). The proposed short B_nN_n+1 chain is predicted to be an effective low-bias spin filters. Moreover, the length-conductance relationships of these BN atomic chains were also studied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]