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Magnetism of Topological Boundary States Induced by Boron Substitution in Graphene Nanoribbons

Niklas Friedrich1, Pedro Brandimarte2, Jingcheng Li1, Shohei Saito3, Shigehiro Yamaguchi4, Iago Pozo5, Diego Peña5, Thomas Frederiksen2,6, Aran Garcia-Lekue2,6 et al.

Daniel Sánchez-Portal2,7,* and José Ignacio Pascual1,6,†

  • 1CIC nanoGUNE BRTA, 20018 Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain
  • 2Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC), 20018 Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain
  • 3Graduate School of Science, Kyoto University, Kyoto 606-8502, Japan
  • 4Graduate School of Science, Nagoya University, Nagoya 464-8602, Japan
  • 5Centro de Investigación en Química Biolóxica e Materiais Moleculares (CiQUS) and Departamento de Química Orgánica, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, 15782 Santiago de Compostela, Spain
  • 6Ikerbasque, Basque Foundation for Science, 48013 Bilbao, Spain
  • 7Centro de Física de Materiales CSIC-UPV/EHU, 20018 Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain

  • *daniel.sanchez@ehu.eus
  • †ji.pascual@nanogune.eu
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Phys. Rev. Lett. 125, 146801 – Published 28 September, 2020

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.125.146801

Abstract

Graphene nanoribbons (GNRs), low-dimensional platforms for carbon-based electronics, show the promising perspective to also incorporate spin polarization in their conjugated electron system. However, magnetism in GNRs is generally associated with localized states around zigzag edges, difficult to fabricate and with high reactivity. Here we demonstrate that magnetism can also be induced away from physical GNR zigzag edges through atomically precise engineering topological defects in its interior. A pair of substitutional boron atoms inserted in the carbon backbone breaks the conjugation of their topological bands and builds two spin-polarized boundary states around them. The spin state was detected in electrical transport measurements through boron-substituted GNRs suspended between the tip and the sample of a scanning tunneling microscope. First-principle simulations find that boron pairs induce a spin 1, which is modified by tuning the spacing between pairs. Our results demonstrate a route to embed spin chains in GNRs, turning them into basic elements of spintronic devices.

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Phys. Rev. Lett. 125, 146801– Published 28 September, 2020
  • Received 6 April 2020
  • Accepted 10 August 2020
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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