Observation of charge to spin conversion in Weyl semimetal WTe2 at room temperature

Journal article, 2020

The discovery of topological Weyl semimetals has revealed opportunities to realize several extraordinary physical phenomena in condensed matter physics. Specifically, Weyl semimetals with strong spin-orbit coupling, broken inversion symmetry, and novel spin textures are predicted to exhibit a large spin Hall effect that can efficiently convert the charge current to a spin current. Here, we report a direct experimental observation of large spin Hall and inverse spin Hall effects in the Weyl semimetal WTe2 at room temperature obeying the Onsager reciprocity relation. We demonstrate the detection of a pure spin current generated by the spin Hall phenomenon in WTe2 by making a van der Waals heterostructure with graphene, taking advantage of its long spin coherence length and spin transmission at the heterostructure interface. These experimental findings, well supported by ab initio calculations, show a large charge-spin conversion efficiency in WTe2, which can pave the way for the utilization of spin-orbit-induced phenomena in spintronic memory and logic circuit architectures.