On the valve nature of a monolayer of aligned molecular magnets in tunneling spin-polarized electrons: towards organic molecular spintronics

Abstract

We form a monolayer of magnetic organic molecules and immobilize their moments pointing either upwards or downwards with respect to the substrate through an electrostatic-binding process. Such a monolayer is probed with a scanning tunneling microscope tip, which is also magnetized with the magnetization vector pointing towards (or away from) apex of the tip. From spin-polarized tunneling current, we show that the current was higher when magnetization vectors of the tip and molecules were parallel as compared to that when they were anti-parallel. We show that for tunneling of spin-polarized electrons, aligned organic molecular magnets can act as a valve.