The role of spin-orbit coupling in the electronic structure of IrO$_2$
Abstract
The delicate interplay of electronic charge, spin, and orbital degrees of freedom is in the heart of many novel phenomena across the transition metal oxide family. Here, by combining high- resolution angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy and first principles calculations (with and without spin-orbit coupling), the electronic structure of the rutile binary iridate, IrO is investigated. The detailed study of electronic bands measured on a high-quality single crystalline sample, and use of a wide range of photon energy provide a huge improvement over the previous studies. The excellent agreement between theory and experimental results shows that the single-particle DFT description of IrO band structure is adequate, without the need of invoking any treatment of correlation effects. Although many observed features point to a 3D nature of the electronic structure, clear surface effects are revealed. The discussion of the orbital character of the relevant bands crossing the Fermi level sheds light on spin orbit coupling-driven phenomena in this material, unveiling a spin-orbit induced avoided crossing, a property likely to play key role in its large spin Hall effect.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1707.01624,
title = {The role of spin-orbit coupling in the electronic structure of IrO$_2$},
author = {Pranab Kumar Das and Jagoda Sławińska and Ivana Vobornik and Jun Fujii and Anna Regoutz and Juhan M. Kahk and David O. Scanlon and Benjamin J. Morgan and Cormac McGuinness and Evegeny Plekhanov and Domenico Di Sante and Ying-Sheng Huang and Ruei-San Chen and Giorgio Rossi and Silvia Picozzi and William R. Branford and Giancarlo Panaccione and David J. Payne},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.01624},
year = {2018}
}