Development of Cu-based spin Hall materials

A promising way for the conversion from charge current to spin current is to exploit the spin Hall effect (SHE). Aside from the usage of elemental nonmagnetic materials, element doping or alloying is a promising way to develop a spin Hall material. In order to reveal the optimum composition for achieving the large SHE in the Cu-Ir binary alloys, we exploited the high-throughput combinatorial technique based on spin Peltier imaging. They discovered that the non-equilibrium Cu-Ir alloys beyond the solubility limit are candidates to achieve the large SHE, in which a large spin-Hall angle of ~ 6% was obtained for Cu76Ir24. In addition to the aspect from SHE, we also found that Cu-Ir is a nonmagnetic spacer layer material allowing us to realize moderately strong antiferromagnetic coupling (AFC) between two ferromagnetic layers separately by Cu-Ir. The simultaneous achievement of AFC and SHE makes the Cu-Ir an useful material for antiferromagnetic spintronics.