Suppression of Spin-Orbit Scattering in Strong-Disordered Gold Nanojunctions

TL;DR

This paper reports that spin-orbit scattering is significantly suppressed in strongly disordered gold nanojunctions compared to weakly disordered films, due to granularity and spin freezing effects, with a new generalized relation proposed.

Contribution

It introduces a novel understanding of spin-orbit scattering suppression in strong-disorder regimes and proposes a generalized Elliot-Yafet relation for granular materials.

Findings

Spin-orbit scattering is suppressed in strong-disordered gold nanojunctions.

Granularity and spin freezing inside grains explain the suppression.

A generalized Elliot-Yafet relation is proposed for granular regimes.

Abstract

We discovered that spin-orbit scattering in strong-disordered gold nanojunctions is strongly suppressed relative to that in weak-disordered gold thin films. This property is unusual because in weak-disordered films, spin-orbit scattering increases with disorder. Granularity and freezing of spin-orbit scattering inside the grains explains the suppression of spin-orbit scattering. We propose a generalized Elliot-Yafet relation that applies to strong-disordered granular regime.