Strain engineering a persistent spin helix with infinite spin lifetime

Abstract

Persistent spin textures (PSTs) in solid-state materials arise from a unidirectional spin-orbit field in momentum space and offer a route to deliver long carrier spin lifetimes sought for future quantum microelectronic devices. Nonetheless, few three-dimensional materials are known to host PSTs owing to crystal symmetry and chemical requirements. There are even fewer examples demonstrated experimentally. Here we report that high-quality persistent spin textures can be obtained in the polar point groups containing an odd number of mirror operations. We use representation theory analysis and electronic structure calculations to formulate general discovery principles to identify PSTs hidden in known complex ternary layered and perovskite structures with large electric polarizations. We then show some of these materials exhibit PSTs without requiring any special crystalline symmetries. This finding removes the limitation imposed by mirror-symmetry protected PSTs that has limited compound discovery. Our general design approach enables the pursuit of persistent spin helices in materials exhibiting the $C_{3v}$ crystal class adopted by many quantum materials exhibiting large Rashba coefficients.

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• Dynamical Generation of Higher-order Spin-Orbit Couplings, Topology and Persistent Spin Texture in Light-Irradiated Altermagnets
• Universal symmetry-protected persistent spin textures in nonmagnetic solids
• Accidental persistent spin textures in the proustite mineral family
• Persistent Spin Textures in Nonpolar Chiral Systems
• Kondo effect in a two-dimensional electron gas in the Persistent Spin Helix regime
• Gap Anisotropy in Layered Superconductors Due to Rashba and Dresselhaus Spin-Orbit Interactions