Spin Hall Effect induced by resonant scattering on impurities in metals

TL;DR

This paper explains the large Spin Hall Effect observed in noble metals doped with impurities by analyzing resonant scattering caused by impurity states split due to spin-orbit interaction, providing insights into optimizing spintronic device performance.

Contribution

It introduces a theoretical explanation for the enhanced Spin Hall Effect in doped metals based on resonant scattering and spin-orbit split impurity states, aligning with experimental observations.

Findings

Resonant scattering explains large Spin Hall Angles in doped noble metals.

Conditions for maximizing the Spin Hall Effect are identified.

Application to copper with 5d impurities matches experimental data.

Abstract

The Spin Hall Effect (SHE) is a promising way for transforming charge currents into spin currents in spintronic devices. Large values of the Spin Hall Angle, the characteristic parameter of the yield of this transformation, have been recently found in noble metals doped with nonmagnetic impurities. We show that this can be explained by resonant scattering off impurity states split by the spin-orbit interaction. We apply our calculation to the interpretation of experiments on copper doped with 5d impurities and we describe the conditions to obtain the largest effects.