Gate controlled electronic transport in monolayer MoS2 field effect transistor

The electronic spin and valley transport properties of a monolayer MoS2 are investigated using the non-equilibrium Green's function formalism combined with density functional theory. Due to the presence of strong Rashba spin orbit interaction (RSOI), the electronic valence bands of monolayer MoS2 are split into spin up and spin down Zeeman-like texture near the two inequivalent vertices K and K' of the first Brillouin zone. When the gate voltage is applied in the scattering region, an additional strong RSOI is induced which generates an effective magnetic field. As a result, electron spin precession occurs along the effective magnetic field, which is controlled by the gate voltage. This, in turn, causes the oscillation of conductance as a function of the magnitude of the gate voltage and the length of the gate region. This current modulation due to the spin precession shows the essential feature of the long sought Datta-Das field effect transistor (FET). From our results, the oscillation periods for the gate voltage and gate length are found to be approximately 2.2V and 20.03a(B) (a(B) is Bohr radius), respectively. These observations can be understood by a simple spin precessing model and indicate that the electron behaviors in monolayer MoS2 FET are both spin and valley related and can easily be controlled by the gate. (C) 2015 AIP Publishing LLC.