Rashba Effect-induced non-VOLatile ferroelectric control of spin-orbit coupling in Two-dimensional materials

The surge of electronic devices in our everyday lives poses severe challenges to the sustainability of our societies.

Spintronics stands at the forefront of solutions considered today by leading industrial actors to drastically improve information and communications systems' scalability and power efficiency.

In this field, most of the efforts focus on information storage based on ferromagnets (FM), readout via spin-charge interconversion (SCI) phenomena, i.e. the conversion of a spin polarisation into a detectable electrical signal, or vice-versa.

However, improvements in SCI efficiency are still necessary and solutions for the electrical writing of FM still need to be more efficient and reliable.

Ferroelectrics (FE), which naturally break inversion symmetry, may allow an efficient SCI when interfaced with other materials.

Since FE also carry information (their electric polarisation) switchable at ultra-low power, they are ideal candidates to replace FM as the new core elements of spintronics. So far, only a few reports demonstrated the FE control of SCI at oxide interfaces or in bulk semiconductors.

Due to their richness and 2D nature, van der Waals (vdW) materials and notably graphene play an increasingly important role in spintronics research, and vdW FE could be a game changer for the field, although they are still under-investigated.

REVOLT aims to study these novel FE and to achieve the non-volatile electric control of SCI in graphene proximitized with FE.

Structural, electrical, and magnetotransport characterisations will be performed on atomically sharp FE/graphene stacks patterned with advanced nano-lithography techniques for which the host institution is expert.

Based on these efforts, REVOLT will shed new light on fundamental physics phenomena and evaluate the potential for a paradigm change in spintronics applications while providing high-quality, interdisciplinary research and transversal skills to a young researcher for the development of his career.