Spin circuit representation of electronic transport in materials with spin orbit coupling
Abstract
Modern nanomagnetic devices involve materials and phenomena featuring both spin and charge transport. SPICE compatible spin circuits with 4-component voltage and current (1 for charge and 3 for spin) have been developed to represent this emerging class of devices. However there has not been much work on circuit representation for materials with high spin-orbit coupling (SOC) which are becoming increasingly important with the discovery of giant spin Hall effect (GSHE) and topological insulators. In this work we describe a spin circuit representation for 3D bulk materials like Tantalum or Tungsten exhibiting GSHE, which has received extensive attention recently due to their potential applications to write units in memory. This work shows how this circuit representation leads to many established results in a straightforward way, while providing a versatile tool for the numerical analysis of complex geometries. Next, we move onto new type of materials called topological insulators where we develop theoretical models for electron transport, benchmark them against available experimental data and make interesting predictions that can be tested experimentally, some aspects of which have recently received experimental support. We believe that this approach is applicable not only to topological insulators but to 2D interfacial channels with SOC in general.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Datta, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Nanoscience|Molecular physics|Nanotechnology
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