Comunicazione
Charge-to-spin interconversion at (111) oxide interfaces.
Trama M., Cataudella V., Perroni C. A., Romeo F., Citro R.
Converting charge current into spin current is one of the main mechanisms exploited in spintronics. One prominent example is the Edelstein effect, namely, the generation of a magnetization in response to an external electric field, which can be realized in systems with lack of inversion symmetry. If a system has electrons with an orbital angular momentum character, an orbital magnetization can be generated by the applied electric field, giving rise to the so-called orbital Edelstein effect. Oxide heterostructures are the ideal platform for these effects due to the strong spin-orbit coupling and the lack of inversion symmetries. Beyond a gate-tunable spin Edelstein effect, we predict an orbital Edelstein effect an order of magnitude larger than the spin one at the (111) $LaAlO_{3}/SrTiO_{3}$ interface. We model the material as a bilayer of $t_{2g}$ orbitals using a tight-binding approach, and show that the hybridization between the electronic bands crucially impacts the Edelstein susceptibility.