Direct electronic measurement of the spin Hall effect

By Sergio O. Valenzuela, M. Tinkham. Nature, 2006

1,251 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The generation, manipulation and detection of spin-polarized electrons in nanostructures define the main challenges of spin-based electronics. Among the different approaches for spin generation and manipulation, spin–orbit coupling—which couples the spin of an electron to its momentum—is attracting considerable interest. In a spin–orbit-coupled system, a non-zero spin current is predicted in a direction perpendicular to the applied electric field, giving rise to a spin Hall effect. Consistent with this effect, electrically induced spin polarization was recently detected by optical techniques at the edges of a semiconductor channel and in two-dimensional electron gases in semiconductor heterostructures. Here we report electrical measurements of the spin Hall effect in a diffusive metallic conductor, using a ferromagnetic electrode in combination with a tunnel barrier to inject a spin-polarized current. In our devices, we observe an induced voltage that results exclusively from the conversion of the injected spin current into charge imbalance through the spin Hall effect. Such a voltage is proportional to the component of the injected spins that is perpendicular to the plane defined by the spin current direction and the voltage probes. These experiments reveal opportunities for efficient spin detection without the need for magnetic materials, which could lead to useful spintronics devices that integrate information processing and data storage.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/14da3edb579fe7ad632415fe6f498627de50da5f

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Citations in the corpus

Current-induced spin-orbit torques in ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic systems (2018, methodology): “Together with the non-local detection in a lateral structure (Valenzuela and Tinkham, 2006), the spin-orbit charge pumping across the NM/FM interface provided the first experimental demonstration of the inverse SHE (Saitoh et al.”
Transmission of electrical signals by spin-wave interconversion in a magnetic insulator (2010, background): “Specifically, the applied electric current is converted into spin angular momentum owing to the spin-Hall effect 7,8,10,11 in the first platinum film; the angular momentum is then carried by a spin wave in the insulating Y 3 Fe 5 O 12 layer; at the distant platinum film, the spin angular momentum…”
Spin Hall Effects in Metals (2013, background): “Valenzuela and Tinkham were the first to use this approach to study spin Hall effects [9], [127].”
Magnetic texture based magnonics (2020, background): “The detected voltage is extremely small, down to a level of 1 nV. Chumak et al. [251] used a conventional stripline antenna to coherently excite spin waves at GHz frequencies (similar to the excitation technique used in the PSWS, c.f. Section 2.2) in a 2.1 µm-thick YIG film detected both electromagn”
Conduction of spin currents through insulating antiferromagnetic oxides (2013, background): “The added properties of light mass and low resistivity have made Al one of the best spin conductors so far [10, 11], with spin diffusion lengths as large as one micron.”
Spin-dependent phenomena and device concepts explored in (Ga,Mn)As (2013, background): “In non-magnetic conductors the SHE is an example of a spintronic phenomenon converting a normal electrical current into a spin-current or vice versa (Jungwirth et al., 2012; Kato et al., 2004; Valenzuela and Tinkham, 2006; Wunderlich et al., 2005).”
Antiferromagnetic spintronics (2016, background): “The spin Hall effect was first experimentally confirmed in semiconducting GaAs (Kato et al., 2004; Wunderlich et al., 2005); it was subsequently detected in metallic materials with large spin-orbit interaction, such as platinum (Saitoh et al., 2006; Valenzuela and Tinkham, 2006).”