Tunable large spin Hall and spin Nernst effects in Dirac semimetals ZrXY (X=Si, Ge; Y=S, Se, Te)

Abstract

The ZrSiS-type compounds are Dirac semimetals and have been attracting considerable interest in recent years due to their topological electronic properties and possible applications. In particular, gapped Dirac nodes can possess large spin Berry curvatures and thus give rise to large spin Hall effect (SHE) and spin Nernst effect (SNE), which may be used to generate pure spin current for spintronics and spin caloritronics without applied magnetic field or magnetic material. In this paper we study both SHE and SNE in ZrXY (X = Si, Ge; Y = S, Se, Te) based on \textit{ab initio} relativistic band structure calculations. Our theoretical calculations reveal that some of these compounds exhibit large intrinsic spin Hall conductivity (SHC) and spin Nernst conductivity (SNC). The calculated SHC of ZrSiTe is as large as -755 ($\hslash$/e)(S/cm). Since the electric conductivity of these Dirac semimetals are much smaller than that of platinum which has the largest intrinsic SHC of $\sim$2200 ($\hslash$/e)(S/cm), this indicates that they will have a larger spin Hall angle than that of platinum. Remarkably, we find that both the magnitude and sign of the SHE and SNE in these compounds can be significantly tuned by changing either the electric field direction or spin current direction and may also be optimized by slightly varying the Fermi level via chemical doping. Analysis of the calculated band- and $k$-resolved spin Berry curvatures show that the large SHE and SNE as well as their remarkable tunabilities originate from the presence of many slightly spin-orbit coupling-gapped Dirac nodal lines near the Fermi level in these Dirac semimetals. Our findings suggest that the ZrSiS-type compounds are promising candidates for spintronic and spin caloritronic devices, and will certainly stimulate further experiments on these Dirac semimetals.

9 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (7)

• Dissipationless Quantum Spin Current at Room Temperature
• Direct electronic measurement of the spin Hall effect
• Dirac Line-nodes and Effect of Spin-orbit Coupling in Non-symmorphic Critical Semimetal MSiS (M=Hf, Zr)
• Spin Nernst effect and Nernst effect in two-dimensional electron systems
• Anomalous Nernst and Hall effects in magnetized platinum and palladium
• Chemical pressure effect on the optical conductivity of the nodal-line semimetals ZrSi$Y$ ($Y$=S, Se, Te) and ZrGe$Y$ ($Y$=S, Te)
• Evidence for bulk nodal loops and universality of Dirac-node arc surface states in ZrGeXc (Xc = S, Se, Te)

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• NMR determination of Van Hove singularity and Lifshitz transitions in nodal-line semimetal ZrSiTe
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• Resonant spin Hall and Nernst effect in a nanoribbon of a spin-orbit coupled electronic system
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