EMERGENT PHENOMENA AND NOVEL DEVICES BASED ON SPIN-ORBIT COUPLING AT COMPLEX OXIDE INTERFACES

Abstract

The primary quest for future nano-electronics applications is to develop functional and energy-efficient devices utilizing novel quantum materials and properties. Spin-orbit coupling (SOC) has been pivotal to this effort as it offers an effective means to drive and manipulate magnetic properties – such as anisotropy, spin relaxation, magnetic damping, anisotropic magnetoresistance, and anomalous Hall effect – allowing it to be exploited for future spin-orbitronics, especially for the logic-in-memory computing with ultralow energy consumption. The building block of such applications is a strong Rashba SOC coupled to a spin-injecting magnetic layer and utilizes a spin-to-charge conversion as the transduction mechanism. This thesis explores the emergent phenomena and quantum phases at heterostructures and interfaces with a broken symmetry aiming at novel and large SOC effects.