All-Electric Spin Control in Interference Single Electron Transistors

Single particle interference lies at the heart of quantum mechanics. The archetypal double-slit experiment(1) has been repeated with electrons in vacuum(2,3) up to the more massive C-60 molecules.(4) Mesoscopic rings threaded by a magnetic flux provide the solid-state analogues.(5,6) Intramolecular interference has been recently discussed in molecular junctions.(7-11) Here we propose to exploit interference to achieve all-electrical control of a single electron spin in quantum dots, a highly desirable property for spintronics(12-14) and spin-qubit applications.(15-19) The device consists of an interference single electron transistor,(10,11) where destructive interference between orbitally degenerate electronic states produces current blocking at specific bias voltages. We show that in the presence of parallel polarized ferromagnetic leads the interplay between interference and the exchange interaction on the system generates an effective energy renormalization yielding different blocking biases for majority and minority spins. Hence, by tuning the bias voltage full control over the spin of the trapped electron is achieved.