Spin dephasing by the Dyakonov-Perel mechanism in metallic films deposited on insulating substrates is revealed, and quantitatively examined by means of density functional calculations combined with a kinetic equation. The surface-to-substrate asymmetry, probed by the metal wave functions in thin films, is found to produce strong spin-orbit fields and a fast Larmor precession, giving a dominant contribution to spin decay over the Elliott-Yafet spin relaxation up to a thickness of 70 nm. The spin dephasing is oscillatory in time with a rapid (subpicosecond) initial decay. However, parts of the Fermi surface act as spin traps, causing a persistent tail signal lasting 1000 times longer than the initial decay time. It is also found that the decay depends on the direction of the initial spin polarization, resulting in a spin-dephasing anisotropy of 200% in the examined cases. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevB.94.180406 In spintronics experiments, spins are often excited in, or transported through, nonmagnetic metallic thin film media [1]. Typical examples are Cu, Au, or Pt, used in spin-current creation or detection via the spin Hall effect [2][3][4][5] or spin Nernst effect [6,7]. Paramount for the spin-transport properties of a medium is the characteristic time T after which the outof-equilibrium spin population that was created in the medium is lost by relaxation or dephasing [8,9]. The microscopic mechanisms leading to spin reduction depend on the material properties, and it is commonly accepted that the Elliott-Yafet (EY) mechanism [10,11] is dominant in metals [12][13][14][15], since they show space-inversion symmetry [16]. However, any substrate on which the film is deposited breaks the inversion symmetry; if the film is thin enough (thinner than the electron phase relaxation length), the resulting asymmetry is felt by the metallic states extending over the film thickness, even though the substrate and surface potential are screened in the film interior. In this case, as we argue in this Rapid Communication, the band structure changes throughout the film and the Dyakonov-Perel (DP) mechanism [17] for spin dephasing is activated and becomes the dominant cause of spin reduction. The DP mechanism (that we briefly describe below) is known to be important in III-V or II-VI semiconductors or semiconductor heterostructures due to their inversion asymmetry [18,19], but, to our knowledge, it has been largely overlooked so far in the important case of supported films or metallic bilayers, which show manifestly no inversion symmetry. Only recently, data from spin-pumping [20] and weak antilocalization [21] experiments in ultrathin films were found to fit the DP and not the EY mechanism.Characteristic of systems with spin-orbit coupling and timereversal symmetry but broken inversion symmetry is the lifting of conjugation degeneracy [11] at each crystal momentum k and energy E k of the band structure. The resulting pair of states where σ is the vector of Pauli matrices and the vector quantity k is called the spin-orbit field (SOF) ...