Tunable magnetic flux sensor using a metallic Rashba ring with half-metal electrodes Available to Purchase

We propose a magnetic field sensor consisting of a square ring made of metal with a strong Rashba spin–orbital coupling (RSOC) and contacted to half-metal electrodes. Due to the Aharonov–Casher effect, the presence of the RSOC imparts a spin-dependent geometric phase to conduction electrons in the ring. The combination of the magnetic flux emanating from the magnetic sample placed below the ring, and the Aharonov–Casher effect due to RSOC results in spin interference, which modulates the spin transport in the ring nanostructure. By using the tight-binding nonequilibrium Green’s function formalism to model the transport across the nanoring detector, we theoretically show that with proper optimization, the Rashba ring can function as a sensitive and tunable magnetic probe to detect magnetic flux.