In some materials the competition between superconductivity and magnetism brings about a variety of unique phenomena such as the coexistence of superconductivity and magnetism in heavy-fermion superconductors or spin-triplet supercurrent in ferromagnetic Josephson junctions. Recent observations of spin-charge separation in a lateral spin valve with a superconductor evidence that these remarkable properties are applicable to spintronics, although there are still few works exploring this possibility. Here, we report the experimental observation of the quasiparticle-mediated spin Hall effect in a superconductor, NbN. This compound exhibits the inverse spin Hall (ISH) effect even below the superconducting transition temperature. Surprisingly, the ISH signal increases by more than 2,000 times compared with that in the normal state with a decrease of the injected spin current. The effect disappears when the distance between the voltage probes becomes larger than the charge imbalance length, corroborating that the huge ISH signals measured are mediated by quasiparticles.
We demonstrate strong anisotropic spin-orbit interaction (SOI) in graphene induced by monolayer WS_{2}. Direct comparison between graphene-monolayer WS_{2} and graphene-bulk WS_{2} systems in magnetotransport measurements reveals that monolayer transition metal dichalcogenide can induce much stronger SOI than bulk. Detailed theoretical analysis of the weak antilocalization curves gives an estimated spin-orbit energy (E_{so}) higher than 10 meV. The symmetry of the induced SOI is also discussed, and the dominant z→-z symmetric SOI can only explain the experimental results. Spin relaxation by the Elliot-Yafet mechanism and anomalous resistance increase with temperature close to the Dirac point indicates Kane-Mele SOI induced in graphene.
We experimentally confirmed that the spin-orbit lengths of noble metals obtained from weak antilocalization measurements are comparable to the spin diffusion lengths determined from lateral spin valve ones. Even for metals with strong spin-orbit interactions such as Pt, we verified that the two methods gave comparable values which were much larger than those obtained from recent spin torque ferromagnetic resonance measurements. To give a further evidence for the comparability between the two length scales, we measured the disorder dependence of the spin-orbit length of copper by changing the thickness of the wire. The obtained spin-orbit length nicely follows a linear law as a function of the diffusion coefficient, clearly indicating that the Elliott-Yafet mechanism is dominant as in the case of the spin diffusion length.
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