A scalable platform to synthesize ultrathin heavy metals may enable high efficiency charge-to-spin conversion for next-generation spintronics. Here we report the synthesis of air-stable, epitaxially registered monolayer Pb underneath bilayer graphene on SiC (0001) by confinement heteroepitaxy (CHet). Diffraction, spectroscopy, and microscopy reveal CHet-based Pb intercalation predominantly exhibits a mottled hexagonal superstructure due to an ordered network of Frenkel-Kontorova-like domain walls. The system's air stability enables ex-situ spin torque ferromagnetic resonance (ST-FMR) measurements that demonstrate charge-to-spin conversion in graphene/Pb/ferromagnet heterostructures with a 1.5x increase in the effective field ratio compared to control samples.
@article{arxiv.2205.06859,
title = {Large-Area Intercalated 2D-Pb/Graphene Heterostructure as a Platform for Generating Spin-Orbit Torque},
author = {Alexander Vera and Boyang Zheng and Wilson Yanez and Kaijie Yang and Seong Yeoul Kim and Xinglu Wang and Jimmy C. Kotsakidis and Hesham El-Sherif and Gopi Krishnan and Roland J. Koch and T. Andrew Bowen and Chengye Dong and Yuanxi Wang and Maxwell Wetherington and Eli Rotenberg and Nabil Bassim and Adam L. Friedman and Robert M. Wallace and Chaoxing Liu and Nitin Samarth and Vincent H. Crespi and Joshua A. Robinson},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.06859},
year = {2024}
}
Comments
27 pages, 5 figures. Supporting Information included (16 pages, 14 figures, 1 table)