Proceedings Article | 4 November 2016
Simón Oyarzún, Ashis Kumar Nandy, Fabien Rortais, Juan Carlos Rojas-Sánchez, Piotr Laczkowski, Stephanie Pouget, Hanako Okuno, Laurent Vila, Céline Vergnaud, Cyrille Beigne, Alain Marty, Jean Philippe Attané, Serge Gambarelli, Jean Marie George, Henri Jaffres, Stefan Blügel, Matthieu Jamet
KEYWORDS: Ferromagnetics, Germanium, Interfaces, Spintronics, Semiconductors, Solid state physics, Electrons, Heterojunctions, Silicon, Microelectronics
The field of spintronics is based on the manipulation of the spin degree of freedom. It uses the carrier spin angular momentum as a basic functional unit in addition to the charge. The first requirement of a semiconductor-based spintronic technology is the efficient generation of spin-polarized carriers into the device heterostructure made of Si or Ge (the materials of mainstream microelectronics) at room temperature. In this presentation, we focus on the generation of a sizeable spin population into Ge by spin pumping. Spin pumping corresponds to the generation of a pure spin current in the Ge film by exciting the ferromagnetic resonance of an adjacent ferromagnetic electrode with microwaves. The pure spin current is then detected using spin-orbit based effects. Our aim is to understand the basic mechanisms of spin pumping into Ge as well as the spin-to-charge conversion by inverse spin Hall effect (ISHE, bulk effect) [1-4] and Rashba-Edelstein effect (interface effect) [5]. The influence of interface states is clearly demonstrated. Moreover, using the spin-split Rashba sub-surface states of the Ge(111) surface, we succeeded in demonstrating a giant conversion of a spin current generated by spin pumping into a charge current by the Rashba-Edelstein effect [6,7]. Our experimental findings are supported by ab-initio calculations.
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