We experimentally study the electronic spin transport in hBN encapsulated single layer graphene nonlocal spin valves. The use of top and bottom gates allows us to control the carrier density and the electric field independently. The spin relaxation times in our devices range up to 2 ns with spin relaxation lengths exceeding 12 µm even at room temperature. We obtain that the ratio of the spin relaxation time for spins pointing out-of-plane to spins in-plane is τ ⊥ /τ || ≈ 0.75 for zero applied perpendicular electric field. By tuning the electric field this anisotropy changes to ≈0.65 at 0.7 V/nm, in agreement with an electric field tunable in-plane Rashba spin-orbit coupling.PACS numbers: 72.80. Vp, 85.75.Hh Keywords: Graphene, spin transport, Rashba spin-orbit interaction, anisotropic spin relaxation, Hanle precession, electric fieldThe generation, manipulation and detection of spin information has been the target of several studies due to the implications for novel spintronic devices [1, 2]. In the recent years graphene has attracted a lot of attention in spintronics due to its theoretically large intrinsic spin relaxation time and length of the order of τ s ≈ 100 ns and λ s ≈ 100 µm respectively [4, 9]. Although experimental results still fall short of these expectations [3][4][5] 7], graphene has already achieved the longest measured nonlocal spin relaxation length [5, 9] and furthest transport of spin information at room temperature [10]. However, the mechanisms for spin relaxation in graphene are still under heavy debate with various theoretical models proposed [4, 8, 9,[11][12][13].To take advantage of the long spin relaxation times in graphene, e.g. for spin logic devices, one requires easy control of the spin information, for example by an applied electric field. Single layer graphene is an ideal system for this purpose, not only because of its high mobilities and low intrinsic spin-orbit fields (SOF), but also due to the simple relation between the carriers' wavevector, the applied perpendicular electric field and the induced Rashba SOF [4, 7, 9,[15][16][17][18][19]. In bilayer graphene a more complicated behavior is expected when spin-orbit coupling is considered [21].Here we report nonlocal spin transport measurements on single layer graphene in which we address both topics specified above. Our devices consist of a single layer graphene flake on hexagonal Boron Nitride (hBN) of which a central region is encapsulated with another hBN flake and hence protected from the environment. The presence of a top and bottom gate give rise to two independent electric fields that are experienced by the graphene: [22], where tg(bg) ≈ 3.9 is the dielectric constant, d tg(bg) is the dielectric thickness and V 0 tg(bg) the position of the charge neutrality point for the top (bottom) gate. Their difference controls the carrier density in the graphene (n = (E bg − E tg ) 0 /e) and their average gives the effective electric field experienced by the graphene (Ē = (E tg + E bg )/2), which breaks the inversion symmetry in t...