One of the most fundamental phenomena and a reminder of the electrons relativistic nature is the Rashba spin splitting for broken inversion symmetry. Usually this splitting is a tiny relativistic correction, hardly discernible in experiment. Interfac
ing a ferroelectric, BaTiO$_3$, and a heavy 5$d$ metal with a large spin-orbit coupling, Ba(Os,Ir)O$_3$, we show that giant Rashba spin splittings are indeed possible and even fully controllable by an external electric field. Based on density functional theory and a microscopic tight binding understanding, we conclude that the electric field is amplified and stored as a ferroelectric Ti-O distortion which, through the network of oxygen octahedra, also induces a large Os-O distortion. The BaTiO$_3$/BaOsO$_3$ heterostructure is hence the ideal test station for studying the fundamentals of the Rashba effect. It allows intriguing application such as the Datta-Das transistor to operate at room temperature.
Two dimensional electron gases (2DEGs) at a oxide heterostructures are attracting considerable attention, as these might substitute conventional semiconductors for novel electronic devices [1]. Here we present a minimal set-up for such a 2DEG -the Sr
TiO3(110)-(4 x 1) surface, natively terminated with one monolayer of chemically-inert titania. Oxygen vacancies induced by synchrotron radiation migrate under- neath this overlayer, this leads to a confining potential and electron doping such that a 2DEG develops. Our angular resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) and theoretical results show that confinement along (110) is strikingly different from a (001) crystal orientation. In particular the quantized subbands show a surprising semi-heavy band, in contrast to the analogue in the bulk, and a high electronic anisotropy. This anisotropy and even the effective mass of the (110) 2DEG is tunable by doping, offering a high flexibility to engineer the properties of this system.
A combined experimental and theoretical investigation of the electronic structure of the archetypal oxide heterointerface system LaAlO3 on SrTiO3 is presented. High-resolution, hard x-ray photoemission is used to uncover the occupation of Ti 3d state
s and the relative energetic alignment - and hence internal electric fields - within the LaAlO3 layer. Firstly, the Ti 2p core level spectra clearly show occupation of Ti 3d states already for two unit cells of LaAlO3. Secondly, the LaAlO3 core levels were seen to shift to lower binding energy as the LaAlO3 overlayer thickness, n, was increased - agreeing with the expectations from the canonical electron transfer model for the emergence of conductivity at the interface. However, not only is the energy offset of only 300meV between n=2 (insulating interface) and n=6 (metallic interface) an order of magnitude smaller than the simple expectation, but it is also clearly not the sum of a series of unit-cell by unit-cell shifts within the LaAlO3 block. Both of these facts argue against the simple charge-transfer picture involving a cumulative shift of the LaAlO3 valence bands above the SrTiO3 conduction bands, resulting in charge transfer only for n>3. Turning to the theoretical data, our density functional simulations show that the presence of oxygen vacancies at the LaAlO3 surface at the 25% level reverses the direction of the internal field in the LaAlO3. Therefore, taking the experimental and theoretical results together, a consistent picture emerges for real-life samples in which nature does not wait until n=4 and already for n=2, mechanisms other than internal-electric-field-driven electron transfer from idealized LaAlO3 to near-interfacial states in the SrTiO3 substrate are active in heading off the incipient polarization catastrophe that drives the physics in these systems.
By means of a Wannier projection within the framework of density functional theory, we are able to identify the modified c-axis hopping and the energy mismatch between the cation bands as the main source of the $t_{2g}$ splitting around the $Gamma$ p
oint for oxide heterostructures, excluding previously proposed mechanisms such as Jahn-Teller distortions or electric field asymmetries. Interfacing LaAlO$_3$, LaVO$_3$, SrVO$_3$ and SrNbO$_3$ with SrTiO$_3$ we show how to tune this orbital splitting, designing heterostructures with more $d_{xy}$ electrons at the interface. Such an orbital engineering is the key for controlling the physical properties at the interface of oxide heterostructures.
