Abstract
The Rashba effect plays important roles in emerging quantum materials physics and potential spintronic applications, entailing both the spin orbit interaction (SOI) and broken inversion symmetry. In this work, we devise asymmetric oxide heterostructures of LaAlO3//SrTiO3/LaAlO3 (LAO//STO/LAO) to study the Rashba effect in STO with an initial centrosymmetric structure, and broken inversion symmetry is created by the inequivalent bottom and top interfaces due to their opposite polar discontinuities. Furthermore, we report the observation of a transition from the cubic Rashba effect to the coexistence of linear and cubic Rashba effects in the oxide heterostructures, which is controlled by the filling of Ti orbitals. Such asymmetric oxide heterostructures with initially centrosymmetric materials provide a general strategy for tuning the Rashba SOI in artificial quantum materials.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Journal | Nature Communications |
| Volume | 10 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jul 11 2019 |
Bibliographical note
KAUST Repository Item: Exported on 2020-10-01Acknowledgements: L.L. and Z. Z. gratefully acknowledge financial support from the National Key R&D Program of China (2017YFA0303602), 3315 Program of Ningbo, and the National Nature Science Foundation of China (11774360). Calculations were performed at the Supercomputing Center of Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering. W. L. and J. C. acknowledge the financial support from the Singapore National Research Foundation under CRP Award No. NRF-CRP10-2012-02 and Singapore Ministry of Education MOE2018-T2-2-043, AMEIRG18-0022, A*STAR IAF-ICP 11801E0036 and MOE Tier 1- FY2018–P23. C.J.L. acknowledges the financial support from the Lee Kuan Yew Postdoctoral Fellowship through the Singapore Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund Tier 1 (Grant No. R-284-000-158-114). F. D. and A. M. acknowledge valuable support from KAUST Supercomputing team and some of the fitting calculations were performed on the Phoenix High Performance Computing facility at the American University of the Middle East, Kuwait. W.P. acknowledges partial support of the Tan Chin Tuan Exchange Fellowship in Engineering and Merlion project .The authors would like to acknowledge the Singapore Synchrotron Light Source (SSLS) for providing the facility necessary for conducting the research. The SSLS Laboratory is a National Research Infrastructure under the Singapore National Research Foundation.