Detection of the Orbital Hall Effect by the Orbital-Spin Conversion

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method to experimentally detect the orbital Hall effect by converting orbital currents to spin currents via spin-orbit coupling and demonstrates potential applications in orbitronic devices.

Contribution

It introduces a strategy to observe the orbital Hall effect through orbital-spin conversion and explores its impact on magnetoresistance for experimental detection.

Findings

Orbital current can be converted to spin current using spin-orbit coupling.

Orbital Hall effect induces large nonreciprocal magnetoresistance.

Proposed methods enable experimental probing of the orbital Hall effect.

Abstract

The intrinsic orbital Hall effect (OHE), the orbital counterpart of the spin Hall effect, was predicted and studied theoretically for more than one decade, yet to be observed in experiments. Here we propose a strategy to convert the orbital current in OHE to the spin current via the spin-orbit coupling from the contact. Furthermore, we find that OHE can induce large nonreciprocal magnetoresistance when employing magnetic contact. Both the generated spin current and the orbital Hall magnetoresistance can be applied to probe the OHE in experiments and design orbitronic devices.