No abstract

Atomically thin semiconducting oxide on graphene carries a unique combination of wide band gap, high charge carrier mobility, and optical transparency, which can be widely applied for optoelectronics. However, study on the epitaxial formation and properties of oxide monolayer on graphene remains unexplored due to hydrophobic graphene surface and limits of conventional bulk deposition technique. Here, we report atomic scale study of heteroepitaxial growth and relationship of a single-atom-thick ZnO layer on graphene using atomic layer deposition. We demonstrate atom-by-atom growth of zinc and oxygen at the preferential zigzag edge of a ZnO monolayer on graphene through in situ observation. We experimentally determine that the thinnest ZnO monolayer has a wide band gap (up to 4.0 eV), due to quantum confinement and graphene-like structure, and high optical transparency. This study can lead to a new class of atomically thin two-dimensional heterostructures of semiconducting oxides formed by highly controlled epitaxial growth.

A polar conductor, where inversion symmetry is broken, may exhibit directional propagation of itinerant electrons, i.e., the rightward and leftward currents differ from each other, when time-reversal symmetry is also broken. This potential rectification effect was shown to be very weak due to the fact that the kinetic energy is much higher than the energies associated with symmetry breaking, producing weak perturbations. Here we demonstrate the appearance of giant nonreciprocal charge transport in the conductive oxide interface, LaAlO3/SrTiO3, where the electrons are confined to two-dimensions with low Fermi energy. In addition, the Rashba spin–orbit interaction correlated with the sub-band hierarchy of this system enables a strongly tunable nonreciprocal response by applying a gate voltage. The observed behavior of directional response in LaAlO3/SrTiO3 is associated with comparable energy scales among kinetic energy, spin–orbit interaction, and magnetic field, which inspires a promising route to enhance nonreciprocal response and its functionalities in spin orbitronics.

A two-dimensional electron gas emerged at a LaAlO/SrTiO interface is an ideal system for "spin-orbitronics" as the structure itself strongly couple the spin and orbital degree of freedom through the Rashba spin-orbit interaction. One of core experiments toward this direction is the nonlocal spin transport measurement, which has remained elusive due to the low spin injection efficiency to this system. Here we bypass the problem by generating a spin current not through the spin injection from outside but instead through the inherent spin Hall effect and demonstrate the nonlocal spin transport. The analysis on the nonlocal spin voltage, confirmed by the signature of a Larmor spin precession and its length dependence, displays that both D'yakonov-Perel' and Elliott-Yafet mechanisms involve in the spin relaxation at low temperature. Our results show that the oxide heterointerface is highly efficient in spin-charge conversion with exceptionally strong spin Hall coefficient γ ∼ 0.15 ± 0.05 and could be an outstanding platform for the study of coupled charge and spin transport phenomena and their electronic applications.

No abstract