Spin current pumped by a rotating magnetic field in zigzag grapheme nanoribbons

We study electron spin resonance in zigzag graphene nanoribbons by applying a rotating magnetic field on the system without any bias. By using the nonequilibrium Green's function technique, the spin-resolved pumped current is explicitly derived in a rotating reference frame. The pumped spin current density increases with the system size and the intensity of the transverse rotating magnetic field. For graphene nanoribbons with an even number of zigzag chains, there is a nonzero pumped charge current in addition to the pumped spin current owing to the broken spatial inversion symmetry of the system, but its magnitude is much smaller than the spin current. The short-ranged static disorder from either impurities or defects in the ribbon can depress the spin current greatly due to the localization effect, whereas the long-ranged disorder from charge impurities can avoid inter-valley scattering so that the spin current can survive in the strong disorder for the single-energy mode. © 2010 IOP Publishing Ltd.