Fully spin-polarized bulk states in ferroelectric GeTe

• Authors: KREMPASKÝ Juraj; FANCIULLI Mauro; NICOLA Laurent; MINÁR Jan; VOLFOVÁ Henrieta; CAHA Ondřej; VOLOBUEV Valentine V.; SÁNCHEZ-BARRIGA Jaime; GMITRA Martin; YAJI Koichiro; KURODA Kenta; SHIN Shik; KOMORI Fumio; SPRINGHOLZ Gunther; DIL J. Hugo
• Year of publication: 2020
• Type: Article in Periodical
• Magazine / Source: Physical Review Research
• MU Faculty or unit: Faculty of Science
• web: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.2.013107
• Doi: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.2.013107
• Keywords: spin polarization; ferroelectrics
• Description: By measuring the spin polarization of GeTe films as a function of light polarization we observed that the bulk states are fully spin polarized in the initial state, in strong contrast with observations for other systems with a strong spin-orbit interaction and the surface derived states in the same system. In agreement with state-of-the-art theory, our experimental results show that fully spin-polarized bulk states are an intrinsic property of the ferroelectric Rashba semiconductor alpha-GeTe(111). The fact that the measured spin-polarization vector does not change with light polarization can be explained by the absence of a mixing of states with a different total angular momentum J.