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Observation of the orbital inverse Rashba–Edelstein effect

Nature Physics volume 19, pages 1855–1860 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

The spin–orbit interaction plays an important role in magnetism and in many quantum materials. It is the cornerstone of the physics of many electronic phases that emerge at interfaces because of broken inversion symmetry. In that context, the spin Rashba effect locks electronic spins with momentum to produce large spin galvanic effects. It has recently been argued that these spin-based effects could in fact be spin–orbit coupling consequences of a potentially larger orbital effect. Here we observe spin-to-charge conversion at a LaAlO3/SrTiO3 interface and demonstrate that its orbital contribution dominates. Our analysis of the in-plane anisotropy and gate voltage dependence of the angular momentum conversion into charge highlights some of the salient features of the orbital Rashba splitting. These results open the door to broader use of pure orbital angular momentum effects and confirm the potential of the orbital degree of freedom for information storage and processing.

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Fig. 1: Geometry of the experiments.
Fig. 2: Back-gate variations of the IEE amplitude.
Fig. 3: Angular variations in the spin-to-charge conversion and comparison with the DFT response.
Fig. 4: Schematic angular contributions.

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available via Zenodo at https://zenodo.org/deposit/7958054. Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

The codes that support the findings of the study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request. Quantum ESPRESSO is available at https://www.quantum-espresso.org/.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge financial support from the French National Agency ANR programme ORION through grant no. ANR-20-CE30-0022-02 and the SPICY project from the Labex NanoSaclay Investissements d’Avenir programme (grant no. ANR-10-LABX-0035). This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Division II) and has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013)/ERC Grant Agreement n.319286 (Q-MAC).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. SPEC, CEA, CNRS, Université Paris-Saclay, CEA Saclay, Gif sur Yvette, France

    Anas El Hamdi, Jean-Yves Chauleau, Cosimo Gorini, Alexander Smogunov, Cyrille Barreteau & Michel Viret

  2. DPMQ, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland

    Margherita Boselli, Clémentine Thibault, Stefano Gariglio & Jean-Marc Triscone

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  1. Anas El Hamdi
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Contributions

M.V. conceived the idea and supervised the project with J.-Y.C. A.E.H., M.V. and J.-Y.C. carried out the experimental measurements, M.B., C.T., S.G. and J.-M.T. provided the samples, A.S. did the DFT calculations and C.B. the tight binding. C.G. participated in the theory part. All authors contributed to the discussion of results.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Michel Viret.

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Nature Physics thanks Kyung-Jin Lee and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Figs. 1–10 and Discussion.

Source data

Source Data Fig. 2

Experimental data and theoretical values for back-gate variations.

Source Data Fig. 3

Experimental data and theoretical values for angular dependences with DFT band-structure calculations.

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El Hamdi, A., Chauleau, JY., Boselli, M. et al. Observation of the orbital inverse Rashba–Edelstein effect. Nat. Phys. 19, 1855–1860 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-023-02121-4

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