Interfacial Spin-Orbit Coupling: A Platform for Superconducting Spintronics

• DOI: 10.1103/physrevapplied.13.014030
• Publication Date: 2020-01-17T10:52:40Z
• Authors: Isidoro Martínez; Petra Högl; César González-Ruano; Juan Pedro Cascales; Coriolan Tiusan; Yuan Lu; Michel Hehn; Alex Matos-Abiague; Jaroslav Fabian; Igor Žutić; Farkhad G. Aliev
• Keywords: Spin–orbit interaction; Anisotropy energy

Spin-orbit coupling (SOC) is a key interaction in spintronics, allowing electrical control of spin or magnetization and, vice versa, magnetic current. However, recent advances have revealed much broader implications SOC that also central to the design topological states with potential applications from low-energy dissipation and faster switching high tolerance disorder. resulting emergent interfacial spin-orbit fields are simply realized junctions through structural inversion asymmetry, while anisotropy magnetoresistance (MR) allows their experimental detection. Surprisingly, we demonstrate an all-epitaxial ferromagnet/$\mathrm{Mg}\mathrm{O}$/metal junction single ferromagnetic region only negligible MR undergoes remarkable transformation below superconducting transition temperature metal. The has 3 orders magnitude higher could enable novel spintronics. In contrast common realizations effects require finite applied field, our system designed two stable zero-field mutually orthogonal magnetizations: plane out plane. This bistable us rule orbital vortex due field identify origin observed MR. Such reaches approximately $20\mathrm{%}$ without be further increased for large support vortices. Our findings call revisit role SOC, even when it seems normal state, suggest alternative platform