Highly efficient and tunable spin-to-charge conversion through Rashba coupling at oxide interfaces

The spin–orbit interaction couples the electrons’ motion to their spin. As a result, a charge current running through a material with strong spin–orbit coupling generates a transverse spin current (spin Hall effect, SHE) and vice versa (inverse spin Hall effect, ISHE). The emergence of SHE and ISHE as charge-to-spin interconversion mechanisms offers a variety of novel spintronic functionalities and devices, some of which do not require any ferromagnetic material. However, the interconversion efficiency of SHE and ISHE (spin Hall angle) is a bulk property that rarely exceeds ten percent, and does not take advantage of interfacial and low-dimensional effects otherwise ubiquitous in spintronic hetero- and mesostructures. Here, we make use of an interface-driven spin–orbit coupling mechanism—the Rashba effect—in the oxide two-dimensional electron system (2DES) LaAlO 3 /SrTiO 3 to achieve spin-to-charge conversion with unprecedented efficiency. Through spin pumping, we inject a spin current from a NiFe film into the oxide 2DES and detect the resulting charge current, which can be strongly modulated by a gate voltage. We discuss the amplitude of the effect and its gate dependence on the basis of the electronic structure of the 2DES and highlight the importance of a long scattering time to achieve efficient spin-to-charge interconversion. The Rashba effect at the LaAlO 3 /SrTiO 3 interface is shown to enable large and gate-tunable spin-to-charge conversion through the inverse Rashba–Edelstein effect.The spin current is injected, through spin pumping, from a NiFe film.