Fully spin-polarized bulk states in ferroelectric GeTe

Krempasky, Juraj; Fanciulli, Mauro; Nicola, Laurent; Minar, Jan; Volfova, Henrieta; Caha, Ondfej; Volobuev, Valentine V.; Sanchez-Barriga, Jaime; Gmitra, Martin; Yaji, Koichiro; Kuroda, Kenta; Shin, Shik; Komori, Fumio; Springholz, Gunther and Dil, J. Hugo (2020): Fully spin-polarized bulk states in ferroelectric GeTe. In: Physical Review Research, Vol. 2, No. 1, 013107

Abstract

By measuring the spin polarization of GeTe films as a function of light polarization we observed that the bulk states are fully spin polarized in the initial state, in strong contrast with observations for other systems with a strong spin-orbit interaction and the surface derived states in the same system. In agreement with state-of-the-art theory, our experimental results show that fully spin-polarized bulk states are an intrinsic property of the ferroelectric Rashba semiconductor alpha-GeTe(111). The fact that the measured spin-polarization vector does not change with light polarization can be explained by the absence of a mixing of states with a different total angular momentum J.

• Item Type: Journal article
• Faculties: Physics
• Subjects: 500 Science > 530 Physics
• Language: English