Publication Date:
2016-09-23
Description:
Author(s): H. M. Benia, E. Rampi, C. Trainer, C. M. Yim, A. Maldonado, D. C. Peets, A. Stöhr, U. Starke, K. Kern, A. Yaresko, G. Levy, A. Damascelli, C. R. Ast, A. P. Schnyder, and P. Wahl Materials with strong spin-orbit coupling often host a unique electronic structure, both in the bulk and on the surface. In particular, in systems that break inversion symmetry, spin-orbit coupling facilitates the Rashba-Dresselhaus effect, leading to a lifting of spin degeneracy in the bulk and intricate spin textures of the Bloch wave functions. Such materials could see potential applications in spintronics and quantum information technology, but these applications would benefit from a broader suite of materials, with a greater range of properties, and in particularly from very strong spin-orbit splitting. This paper’s angular-resolved photoemission and low-temperature scanning tunneling microscopy experiments, together with relativistic first-principles band structure calculations, identify several Dirac surface states in BiPd, one of which exhibits an extremely large spin splitting. Unlike the surface states in inversion-symmetric systems, the Dirac surface states of BiPd have completely different properties at opposite faces of the crystal and are not trivially linked by symmetry. The spin splitting of the surface states exhibits a strong anisotropy by itself, which can be linked to the low in-plane symmetry of the surface termination. Both may be useful to implement new functionalities for spintronic applications. [Phys. Rev. B 94, 121407(R)] Published Thu Sep 22, 2016
Keywords:
Surface physics, nanoscale physics, low-dimensional systems
Print ISSN:
1098-0121
Electronic ISSN:
1095-3795
Topics:
Physics
Permalink
