Giant switchable Rashba effect in oxide heterostructures
Abstract
One of the most fundamental phenomena and a reminder of the electron's relativistic nature is the Rashba spin splitting for broken inversion symmetry. Usually this splitting is a tiny relativistic correction, hardly discernible in experiment. Interfacing a ferroelectric, BaTiO, and a heavy 5 metal with a large spin-orbit coupling, Ba(Os,Ir)O, we show that giant Rashba spin splittings are indeed possible and even fully controllable by an external electric field. Based on density functional theory and a microscopic tight binding understanding, we conclude that the electric field is amplified and stored as a ferroelectric Ti-O distortion which, through the network of oxygen octahedra, also induces a large Os-O distortion. The BaTiO/BaOsO heterostructure is hence the ideal test station for studying the fundamentals of the Rashba effect. It allows intriguing application such as the Datta-Das transistor to operate at room temperature.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1502.05870,
title = {Giant switchable Rashba effect in oxide heterostructures},
author = {Zhicheng Zhong and Liang Si and Qinfang Zhang and Wei-Guo Yin and Seiji Yunoki and Karsten Held},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1502.05870},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
This is the pre-peer reviewed version of the following article:Giant switchable Rashba effect in oxide heterostructures, advanced materials interfaces 2015, 1400445, which has been published in final form at http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/admi.201400445