Proposal for Unambiguous Electrical Detection of Spin-Charge Conversion in Lateral Spin Valves.

Efficient detection of spin-charge conversion is crucial for advancing our understanding of emergent phenomena in spin-orbit-coupled nanostructures. Here, we provide a proof of principle of an electrical detection scheme of spin-charge conversion that enables full disentanglement of competing spin-orbit coupling (SOC) transport phenomena in diffusive lateral channels, i.e., the inverse spin Hall effect and the spin galvanic effect. A suitable geometry in an applied oblique magnetic field is shown to provide direct access to SOC transport coefficients through a symmetry analysis of the output nonlocal resistance. The scheme is robust against tilting of the spin-injector magnetization, disorder, and spurious non-spin-related contributions to the nonlocal signal and can be used to probe spin-charge conversion effects in both spin-valve and hybrid optospintronic devices.

Anomalous Hall Effect in 2D Dirac Materials.

We present a unified theory of charge carrier transport in 2D Dirac systems with broken mirror inversion and time-reversal symmetries (e.g., as realized in ferromagnetic graphene). We find that the entanglement between spin and pseudospin SU(2) degrees of freedom stemming from spin-orbit effects leads to a distinctive gate voltage dependence (change of sign) of the anomalous Hall conductivity approaching the topological gap, which remains robust against impurity scattering and thus is a smoking gun for magnetized 2D Dirac fermions. Furthermore, we unveil a robust skew scattering mechanism, modulated by the spin texture of the energy bands, which causes a net spin accumulation at the sample boundaries even for spin-transparent disorder. The newly unveiled extrinsic spin Hall effect is readily tunable by a gate voltage and opens novel opportunities for the control of spin currents in 2D ferromagnetic materials.

Covariant Conservation Laws and the Spin Hall Effect in Dirac-Rashba Systems.

We present a theoretical analysis of two-dimensional Dirac-Rashba systems in the presence of disorder and external perturbations. We unveil a set of exact symmetry relations (Ward identities) that impose strong constraints on the spin dynamics of Dirac fermions subject to proximity-induced interactions. This allows us to demonstrate that an arbitrary dilute concentration of scalar impurities results in the total suppression of nonequilibrium spin Hall currents when only Rashba spin-orbit coupling is present. Remarkably, a finite spin Hall conductivity is restored when the minimal Dirac-Rashba model is supplemented with a spin-valley interaction. The Ward identities provide a systematic way to predict the emergence of the spin Hall effect in a wider class of Dirac-Rashba systems of experimental relevance and represent an important benchmark for testing the validity of numerical methodologies.

Optimal Charge-to-Spin Conversion in Graphene on Transition-Metal Dichalcogenides.

When graphene is placed on a monolayer of semiconducting transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) its band structure develops rich spin textures due to proximity spin-orbital effects with interfacial breaking of inversion symmetry. In this work, we show that the characteristic spin winding of low-energy states in graphene on a TMD monolayer enables current-driven spin polarization, a phenomenon known as the inverse spin galvanic effect (ISGE). By introducing a proper figure of merit, we quantify the efficiency of charge-to-spin conversion and show it is close to unity when the Fermi level approaches the spin minority band. Remarkably, at high electronic density, even though subbands with opposite spin helicities are occupied, the efficiency decays only algebraically. The giant ISGE predicted for graphene on TMD monolayers is robust against disorder and remains large at room temperature.