Large Chiral Orbital Texture and Orbital Edelstein Effect in Co/Al Heterostructure.

ABSTRACT: Recent experiments by S. Krishnia et al. [Nano Lett. 2023, 23, 6785] reported an unprecedentedly large enhancement of torques upon inserting thin Al layer in Co/Pt heterostructure that suggested the presence of a Rashba-like interaction at the metallic Co/Al interface. Based on first-principles calculations, we reveal the emergence of a large helical orbital texture in reciprocal space at the interfacial Co layer, whose origin is attributed to the orbital Rashba effect due to the formation of the surface states at the Co/Al interface and where spin-orbit coupling is found to produce smaller contributions with a higher-order winding of the orbital moments. Our results unveil that the orbital texture gives rise to a nonequilibrium orbital accumulation producing large cur

SUBMITTER: Nikolaev SA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11528436 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature