2023/12/21 by Pino D’Amico, D'Amico, Pino, Alessandra Catellani +11
Engineering · Materials Science · #FOS: Physical sciences #Materials Science (cond-mat.mtrl-sci) #Nanomaterials and Printing Technologies #Semiconductor materials and devices #ZnO doping and properties
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2312.13708
openalex publication_date 2023/12/21 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Transparent Conductors (TCs) exhibit optical transparency and electron conductivity, and are essential for many opto-electronic and photo-voltaic devices. The most common TCs are electron-doped oxides, which have few limitations when transition metals are used as dopants. Non-oxides TCs have the potential of extending the class of materials to the magnetic realm, bypass technological bottlenecks, and bring TCs to the field of spintronics. Here we propose new functional materials that combine transparency and conductivity with magnetic spin polarization that can be used for spintronic applications, such as spin filters. By using high-throughput first-principles techniques, we identified a large number of potential TCs, including non-oxides materials. Our results indicate that proper doping with transition metals introduces a finite magnetization that can provide spin filtering up to 90% in the electrical conductivity, still maintaining a transparency greater than 90%.