Spin-polarized transport and thermopower of organometallic nanocontacts

We present a theoretical study of the length dependence of both conductance and thermopower of organometallic vanadium-benzene molecules (V nBzn+1) sandwiched between magnetic Co(100) electrodes. We show that the molecules with n≥3 are efficient spin filters. Namely, we find that the zero bias conductance of the majority electrons is small and decays exponentially with increasing length of the molecule and is in the tunneling regime while the minority electrons show metallic conductance. We show furthermore that the thermopower strongly depends on the length of the molecules and can even change sign as a function of length and temperature.