Non-volatile electric control of spin–charge conversion in a SrTiO3 Rashba system

Paul Noël, Felix Trier, Luis M. Vicente Arche, Julien Bréhin, Diogo C. Vaz, Vincent Garcia, Stéphane Fusil, Agnès Barthélémy, Laurent Vila, Manuel Bibes () and Jean-Philippe Attané ()
Additional contact information
Paul Noël: Université Grenoble Alpes, CEA, CNRS, Spintec
Felix Trier: Université Paris-Saclay
Luis M. Vicente Arche: Université Paris-Saclay
Julien Bréhin: Université Paris-Saclay
Diogo C. Vaz: Université Paris-Saclay
Vincent Garcia: Université Paris-Saclay
Stéphane Fusil: Université Paris-Saclay
Agnès Barthélémy: Université Paris-Saclay
Laurent Vila: Université Grenoble Alpes, CEA, CNRS, Spintec
Manuel Bibes: Université Paris-Saclay
Jean-Philippe Attané: Université Grenoble Alpes, CEA, CNRS, Spintec

Nature, 2020, vol. 580, issue 7804, 483-486

Abstract: Abstract After 50 years of development, the technology of today’s electronics is approaching its physical limits, with feature sizes smaller than 10 nanometres. It is also becoming clear that the ever-increasing power consumption of information and communication systems1 needs to be contained. These two factors require the introduction of non-traditional materials and state variables. As recently highlighted2, the remanence associated with collective switching in ferroic systems is an appealing way to reduce power consumption. A promising approach is spintronics, which relies on ferromagnets to provide non-volatility and to generate and detect spin currents3. However, magnetization reversal by spin transfer torques4 is a power-consuming process. This is driving research on multiferroics to achieve low-power electric-field control of magnetization5, but practical materials are scarce and magnetoelectric switching remains difficult to control. Here we demonstrate an alternative strategy to achieve low-power spin detection, in a non-magnetic system. We harness the electric-field-induced ferroelectric-like state of strontium titanate (SrTiO3)6–9 to manipulate the spin–orbit properties10 of a two-dimensional electron gas11, and efficiently convert spin currents into positive or negative charge currents, depending on the polarization direction. This non-volatile effect opens the way to the electric-field control of spin currents and to ultralow-power spintronics, in which non-volatility would be provided by ferroelectricity rather than by ferromagnetism.

Date: 2020
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DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2197-9

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