Efficient spin accumulation carried by slow relaxons in chiral tellurium

Abstract

Efficient conversion between charge currents and spin signals is crucial for realizing magnet-free spintronic devices. However, the strong spin-orbit coupling that enables such a conversion, causes rapid relaxation of spins, making them difficult to transport over large length scales. Here, we show that spin-momentum entanglement at the Fermi surface of chiral tellurium crystals leads to the appearance of slow collective relaxation modes. These modes, called relaxons, resemble the persistent spin helix, a collective spin-wave excitation with extended lifetime observed in quantum wells. The slow relaxons dominate the electrically generated spin and orbital angular momentum accumulation in tellurium and make it possible to combine a very high 50% conversion efficiency with a long spin lifetime. These results, obtained from the exact solution of the Boltzmann transport equation, show that chiral crystals can be used for highly efficient generation and transmission of spin signals over long distances in spintronic devices.

9 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (13)

• Quantum ESPRESSO: a modular and open-source software project for quantum simulations of materials
• Advanced capabilities for materials modelling with Quantum ESPRESSO
• Topological Surface States Protected From Backscattering by Chiral Spin Texture
• An Exact SU(2) Symmetry and Persistent Spin Helix in a Spin-Orbit Coupled System
• Emergence of the persistent spin helix in semiconductor quantum wells
• Direct mapping of the formation of a persistent spin helix: Supplementary information
• Gate-tuneable and chirality-dependent charge-to-spin conversion in Tellurium nanowires
• Electron spin relaxation in bulk III-V semiconductors from a fully microscopic kinetic spin Bloch equation approach
• Anisotropic current-induced spin accumulation in the two-dimensional electron gas with spin-orbit coupling
• Semiclassical framework for the calculation of transport anisotropies
• Long-range current-induced spin accumulation in chiral crystals
• Analogs of Rashba-Edelstein effect from density functional theory
• Spin Relaxation, Diffusion and Edelstein Effect in Chiral Metal Surface

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Universal symmetry-protected persistent spin textures in nonmagnetic solids
• Persistent spin textures, altermagnetism and charge-to-spin conversion in metallic chiral crystals TM${}_3$X${}_6$
• Chirality-dependent spin polarization in metals: linear and quadratic responses