Recently, our paper about spin transport in metallic thin film sandwiched by insulators is published on Physical Review B 87, 081407(R) (2013) (Rapid Communications).
In this paper, we predicted theoretically that, when a normal metallic thin film (without bulk spin-orbit coupling, such as Cu or Al) is sandwiched by two insulators (See right figure), two prominent effects arise due to the interfacial spin-orbit coupling: a giant spin-Hall conductivity due to the surface scattering and a transverse electric polarization due to the spin-dependent phase shift in the spinor wave functions.
The spin Hall effect and its inverse effect are essential in generating and detecting spin current in the spintronic applications. The sandwich-type structure proposed in this paper has the potential application to replace noble metals (such as Pt) as a source and detector for spin currents.
This work was carried out in collaboration with Dr. Xuhui Wang and Prof. Aurelien Manchon in King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia, and Prof. Sadamich Maekawa in Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) in Japan.