TY  - JOUR
A1  - Rinaldi, Christian
A1  - Varotto, Sara
A1  - Asa, Marco
A1  - Slawinska, Jagoda
A1  - Fujii, Jun
A1  - Vinai, Giovanni
A1  - Cecchi, Stefano
A1  - Di Sante, Domenico
A1  - Calarco, Raffaella
A1  - Vobornik, Ivana
A1  - Panaccione, Giancarlo
A1  - Picozzi, Silvia
A1  - Bertacco, Riccardo
T1  - Ferroelectric Control of the Spin Texture in GeTe
JF  - Nano Letters
N2  - The electric and nonvolatile control of the spin texture in semiconductors would represent a fundamental step toward novel electronic devices combining memory and computing functionalities. Recently, GeTe has been theoretically proposed as the father compound of a new class of materials, namely ferroelectric Rashba semiconductors. They display bulk bands with giant Rashba-like splitting due to the inversion symmetry breaking arising from the ferroelectric polarization, thus allowing for the ferroelectric control of the spin. Here, we provide the experimental demonstration of the correlation between ferroelectricity and spin texture. A surface-engineering strategy is used to set two opposite predefined uniform ferroelectric polarizations, inward and outward, as monitored by piezoresponse force microscopy. Spin and angular resolved photoemission experiments show that these GeTe(111) surfaces display opposite sense of circulation of spin in bulk Rashba bands. Furthermore, we demonstrate the crafting of nonvolatile ferroelectric patterns in GeTe films at the nanoscale by using the conductive tip of an atomic force microscope. Based on the intimate link between ferroelectric polarization and spin in GeTe, ferroelectric patterning paves the way to the investigation of devices with engineered spin configurations.
KW  - Germanium telluride
KW  - Rashba effect
KW  - ferroelectricity
KW  - spin-orbitronics
Y1  - 2018
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-226294
VL  - 18
IS  - 5
ER  -