Published in

American Institute of Physics, Applied Physics Letters, 4(110), p. 042403, 2017

DOI: 10.1063/1.4974820

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Optical generation of pure spin currents at the indirect gap of bulk Si

Journal article published in 2017 by F. Bottegoni, C. Zucchetti, F. Ciccacci ORCID, M. Finazzi, G. Isella ORCID
This paper is available in a repository.
This paper is available in a repository.

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Abstract

We report on the optical generation of a pure spin current at the indirect gap of bulk Si at room temperature in the photon energy range comprised between 1.2 and 1.8 eV. Spin-polarized electrons are promoted to the Δ-valleys of the Si Brillouin zone by circularly polarized light. The photo-generated spin current is then detected by exploiting a Schottky Pt/Si(001) junction: spin-polarized electrons diffuse toward the Pt/Si interface and enter the Pt layer where the spin current is converted into a transverse electromotive field through the inverse spin-Hall effect (ISHE). The photon energy dependence of the ISHE signal is interpreted in the frame of a one-dimensional spin drift-diffusion model, which allows estimating the electron spin lifetime to be τs=15±5 ns.