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Coexistence of large conventional and planar spin Hall effect with long spin diffusion length in a low-symmetry semimetal at room temperature

Nature Materials volume 19, pages 292–298 (2020)Cite this article

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Abstract

The spin Hall effect (SHE) is usually observed as a bulk effect in high-symmetry crystals with substantial spin–orbit coupling (SOC), where the symmetric spin–orbit field imposes a widely encountered trade-off between spin Hall angle (θSH) and spin diffusion length (Lsf), and spin polarization, spin current and charge current are constrained to be mutually orthogonal. Here, we report a large θSH of 0.32 accompanied by a long Lsf of 2.2 μm at room temperature in a low-symmetry few-layered semimetal MoTe2, thus identifying it as an excellent candidate for simultaneous spin generation, transport and detection. In addition, we report that longitudinal spin current with out-of-plane polarization can be generated by both transverse and vertical charge current, due to the conventional and a newly observed planar SHE, respectively. Our study suggests that manipulation of crystalline symmetries and strong SOC opens access to new charge-spin interconversion configurations and spin–orbit torques for spintronic applications.

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Fig. 1: Crystal symmetry of bulk and few-layered MoTe2.
Fig. 2: Conventional SHE in MoTe2.
Fig. 3: Charge-induced out-of-plane spin current.
Fig. 4: Planar SHE and performance benchmark.
Fig. 5: DFT calculations of the SHE of MoTe2.

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Data availability

The datasets generated by the present study are available from the corresponding author on request.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge S. Roche for insightful discussions. K.P.L. acknowledges the AME-IRG grant ‘Scalable Growth of Ultrathin Ferroelectric Materials for Memory Technologies’, no. A1938c0035, funded by the Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Singapore. P.S. thanks B. Özyilmaz for providing molecular-beam epitaxy slots and H. Chen for assistance in electron-beam lithography.

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Author notes

  1. These authors contribute equally: Peng Song, Chuang-Han Hsu.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Advanced 2D Materials and Graphene Research Centre, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Peng Song, Chuang-Han Hsu, Jiawei Liu, Wei Fu, Yanpeng Liu, Vitor M. Pereira & Kian Ping Loh

  2. Department of Chemistry, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Peng Song, Wei Fu, Yanpeng Liu & Kian Ping Loh

  3. Department of Physics, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Chuang-Han Hsu, Jiawei Liu & Vitor M. Pereira

  4. Yale-NUS College, Singapore, Singapore

    Giovanni Vignale

  5. Department of Physics, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA

    Giovanni Vignale

  6. Institute of Materials Research and Engineering, Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Innovis, Singapore, Singapore

    Meng Zhao

  7. State Key Laboratory of Surface Physics and Department of Physics, Fudan University, Shanghai, China

    Yujun Deng & Yuanbo Zhang

  8. Institute of Physics, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan

    Hsin Lin

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Contributions

P.S. and K.P.L. conceived the project, P.S. performed device fabrication and electric measurements with help from Y.D. and Y.Z. C.H.H., H.L., V.M.P. and G.V. performed DFT calculations and theoretical modelling. M.Z. performed Raman measurements and exfoliation of h-BN, J.L. performed MBE deposition of Co, W.F. drew part of the schematics and Y.L. helped with figure processing. P.S., C.H.H., V.M.P. and K.P.L. wrote the manuscript with input from all authors.

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Correspondence to Hsin Lin, Vitor M. Pereira or Kian Ping Loh.

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Song, P., Hsu, CH., Vignale, G. et al. Coexistence of large conventional and planar spin Hall effect with long spin diffusion length in a low-symmetry semimetal at room temperature. Nat. Mater. 19, 292–298 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-019-0600-4

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