We investigate the electron transport in silicene with both staggered electric potential and magnetization; the latter comes from the magnetic proximity effect by depositing silicene on a magnetic insulator. It is shown that the silicene could be a spin and valley half metal under appropriate parameters when the spin-orbit interaction is considered; further, the filtered spin and valley could be controlled by modulating the staggered potential or magnetization. It is also found that in the spin-valve structure of silicene, not only can the antiparallel magnetization configuration significantly reduce the valve-structure conductance, but the reversing staggered electric potential can cause a high-performance magnetoresistance due to the spin and valley blocking effects. Our findings show that the silicene might be an ideal basis for the spin and valley filter analyzer devices.
We theoretically study the differential conductance of a graphene/graphene superconductor junction, where the valley polarization of Dirac electrons is considered in the nonsuperconducting region. It is shown that the subgap conductance will increase monotonically with the valley-polarization strength when the chemical potential μ is near the Dirac point μ≤ 3?(? is the superconducting gap), whereas it will decrease monotonically when μ is far away from the Dirac point, μ≥ 5?.The former case is induced by the specular Andreev reflection while the retro-reflection accounts for the later result. Our findings may shed light on the control of conductance of a graphene superconductor junction by valley polarization.
