Dirac Half-Semimetallicity and Antiferromagnetism in Graphene Nanoribbon/Hexagonal Boron Nitride Heterojunctions. 2023

Nikita V Tepliakov, and Ruize Ma, and Johannes Lischner, and Efthimios Kaxiras, and Arash A Mostofi, and Michele Pizzochero
Departments of Materials and Physics, Imperial College London, London SW7 2AZ, United Kingdom.

Half-metals have been envisioned as active components in spintronic devices by virtue of their completely spin-polarized electrical currents. Actual materials hosting half-metallic phases, however, remain scarce. Here, we predict that recently fabricated heterojunctions of zigzag nanoribbons embedded in two-dimensional hexagonal boron nitride are half-semimetallic, featuring fully spin-polarized Dirac points at the Fermi level. The half-semimetallicity originates from the transfer of charges from hexagonal boron nitride to the embedded graphene nanoribbon. These charges give rise to opposite energy shifts of the states residing at the two edges, while preserving their intrinsic antiferromagnetic exchange coupling. Upon doping, an antiferromagnetic-to-ferrimagnetic phase transition occurs in these heterojunctions, with the sign of the excess charge controlling the spatial localization of the net magnetic moments. Our findings demonstrate that such heterojunctions realize tunable one-dimensional conducting channels of spin-polarized Dirac fermions seamlessly integrated into a two-dimensional insulator, thus holding promise for the development of carbon-based spintronics.

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