Graphene Spintronics: A Theoretical Study

Graphene has attracted a great deal of research interest for its special electronic properties. Particularly, graphene is regarded as an important material for making spintronics devices for its long spin relaxation time. There are some studies of how graphene nanostructures can be used to build qubits for making quantum computers. The spontaneous occurrence of magnetizations due to defects, doping and the edge states were also studied in detail for fundamental understanding as well as application reasons. Recently, strong spin splitting due to spin-orbit interaction was found in graphene grown on a metal substrate with a gold intercalation layer. Potentially this is a method for spin control. On the other hand, the ferromagnetic proximity effect has been investigated as a means to generate spin splitting in graphene for spintronics applications. Despite these research efforts and the importance of this research direction, our understanding of how to build effective spintronics devices for the detection, generation and manipulation of spins in graphene nanostructures is still rudimentary. It is important for the development of graphene quantum computers as well as other spintronics applications to have this knowledge. The objective of this project is to study how spin interactions such as spin-orbit interaction and ferromagnetic interaction can be used to achieve these functions in graphene nanostructures. The results obtained in this project can be used by experimentalists in the design and fabrication of graphene spintronics devices.