Spin-polarized electron transport through helicene molecular junctions

Recently, the spin-selectivity effect of chiral molecules has been attracting extensive and growing interest among the scientific communities. Here, we propose a model Hamiltonian to study spin-dependent electron transport through helicene molecules which are connected by two semi-infinite graphene nanoribbons and try to elucidate a recent experiment of the spin-selectivity effect observed in the helicene molecules. The results indicate that the helicene molecules can present a significant spin-filtering effect in the case of extremely weak spin-orbit coupling, which is three orders of magnitude smaller than the hopping integral. The underlying physics is attributed to intrinsic chiral symmetry of the helicene molecules. When the chirality is switched from the right-handed species to the left-handed species, the spin polarization is reversed exactly. These results are consistent with a recent experiment [V. Kiran et al., Adv. Mater. 28, 1957 (2016)]. In addition, the spin-filtering effect of the helicene molecules is robust against molecular lengths, dephasing strengths, and space position disorder. This theoretical work may motivate further studies on chiral-induced spin selectivity in molecular systems.