No Arabic abstract
We determine the spin-lifetime anisotropy of spin-polarized carriers in graphene. In contrast to prior approaches, our method does not require large out-of-plane magnetic fields and thus it is reliable for both low- and high-carrier densities. We first determine the in-plane spin lifetime by conventional spin precession measurements with magnetic fields perpendicular to the graphene plane. Then, to evaluate the out-of-plane spin lifetime, we implement spin precession measurements under oblique magnetic fields that generate an out-of-plane spin population. We find that the spin-lifetime anisotropy of graphene on silicon oxide is independent of carrier density and temperature down to 150 K, and much weaker than previously reported. Indeed, within the experimental uncertainty, the spin relaxation is isotropic. Altogether with the gate dependence of the spin lifetime, this indicates that the spin relaxation is driven by magnetic impurities or random spin-orbit or gauge fields.
We report the discovery of a strong and tunable spin lifetime anisotropy with excellent spin lifetimes up to 7.8 ns in dual-gated bilayer graphene. Remarkably, this realizes the manipulation of spins in graphene by electrically-controlled spin-orbit fields, which is unexpected due to graphenes weak intrinsic spin-orbit coupling. We utilize both the in-plane magnetic field Hanle precession and oblique Hanle precession measurements to directly compare the lifetimes of out-of-plane vs. in-plane spins. We find that near the charge neutrality point, the application of a perpendicular electric field opens a band gap and generates an out-of-plane spin-orbit field that stabilizes out-of-plane spins against spin relaxation, leading to a large spin lifetime anisotropy. This intriguing behavior occurs because of the unique spin-valley coupled band structure of bilayer graphene. Our results demonstrate the potential for highly tunable spintronic devices based on dual-gated 2D materials.
Spin Hall effects have surged as promising phenomena for spin logics operations without ferromagnets. However, the magnitude of the detected electric signals at room temperature in metallic systems has been so far underwhelming. Here, we demonstrate a two-order of magnitude enhancement of the signal in monolayer graphene/Pt devices when compared to their fully metallic counterparts. The enhancement stems in part from efficient spin injection and the large resistivity of graphene but we also observe 100% spin absorption in Pt and find an unusually large effective spin Hall angle of up to 0.15. The large spin-to-charge conversion allows us to characterise spin precession in graphene under the presence of a magnetic field. Furthermore, by developing an analytical model based on the 1D diffusive spin-transport, we demonstrate that the effective spin-relaxation time in graphene can be accurately determined using the (inverse) spin Hall effect as a means of detection. This is a necessary step to gather full understanding of the consequences of spin absorption in spin Hall devices, which is known to suppress effective spin lifetimes in both metallic and graphene systems.
The specific band structure of graphene, with its unique valley structure and Dirac neutrality point separating hole states from electron states has led to the observation of new electronic transport phenomena such as anomalously quantized Hall effects, absence of weak localization and the existence of a minimum conductivity. In addition to dissipative transport also supercurrent transport has already been observed. It has also been suggested that graphene might be a promising material for spintronics and related applications, such as the realization of spin qubits, due to the low intrinsic spin orbit interaction, as well as the low hyperfine interaction of the electron spins with the carbon nuclei. As a first step in the direction of graphene spintronics and spin qubits we report the observation of spin transport, as well as Larmor spin precession over micrometer long distances using single graphene layer based field effect transistors. The non-local spin valve geometry was used, employing four terminal contact geometries with ferromagnetic cobalt electrodes, which make contact to the graphene sheet through a thin oxide layer. We observe clear bipolar (changing from positive to negative sign) spin signals which reflect the magnetization direction of all 4 electrodes, indicating that spin coherence extends underneath all 4 contacts. No significant changes in the spin signals occur between 4.2K, 77K and room temperature. From Hanle type spin precession measurements we extract a spin relaxation length between 1.5 and 2 micron at room temperature, only weakly dependent on charge density, which is varied from n~0 at the Dirac neutrality point to n = 3.6 10^16/m^2. The spin polarization of the ferromagnetic contacts is calculated from the measurements to be around 10%.
Spin relaxation can be greatly enhanced in narrow channels of two-dimensional electron gas due to ballistic spin resonance, which is mediated by spin-orbit interaction for trajectories that bounce rapidly between channel walls. The channel orientation determines which momenta affect the relaxation process, so comparing relaxation for two orientations provides a direct determination of spin-orbit anisotropy. Electrical measurements of pure spin currents are shown to reveal an order of magnitude stronger relaxation for channels fabricated along the [110] crystal axis in a GaAs electron gas compared to [-110] channels, believed to result from interference between structural and bulk inversion asymmetries.
We generalize the diffusive model for spin injection and detection in nonlocal spin structures to account for spin precession under an applied magnetic field in an anisotropic medium, for which the spin lifetime is not unique and depends on the spin orientation.We demonstrate that the spin precession (Hanle) line shape is strongly dependent on the degree of anisotropy and on the orientation of the magnetic field. In particular, we show that the anisotropy of the spin lifetime can be extracted from the measured spin signal, after dephasing in an oblique magnetic field, by using an analytical formula with a single fitting parameter. Alternatively, after identifying the fingerprints associated with the anisotropy, we propose a simple scaling of the Hanle line shapes at specific magnetic field orientations that results in a universal curve only in the isotropic case. The deviation from the universal curve can be used as a complementary means of quantifying the anisotropy by direct comparison with the solution of our generalized model. Finally, we applied our model to graphene devices and find that the spin relaxation for graphene on silicon oxide is isotropic within our experimental resolution.