English

Insight into the skew-scattering mechanism of the spin Hall effect: potential scattering versus spin-orbit scattering

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2013-12-17 v1 Strongly Correlated Electrons

Abstract

We present a detailed analysis of the skew-scattering contribution to the spin Hall conductivity using an extended version of the resonant scattering model of Fert and Levy [Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 106}, 157208 (2011)]. For 5d5d impurities in a Cu host, the proposed phase shift model reproduces the corresponding first-principles calculations. Crucial for that agreement is the consideration of two scattering channels related to pp and dd impurity states, since the discussed mechanism is governed by a subtle interplay between the spin-orbit and potential scattering in both angular-momentum channels. It is shown that the potential scattering strength plays a decisive role for the magnitude of the spin Hall conductivity.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1308.4012,
  title  = {Insight into the skew-scattering mechanism of the spin Hall effect: potential scattering versus spin-orbit scattering},
  author = {Christian Herschbach and Dmitry V. Fedorov and Ingrid Mertig and Martin Gradhand and Kristina Chadova and Hubert Ebert and Diemo Ködderitzsch},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1308.4012},
  year   = {2013}
}