Charge-to-spin conversion in fully epitaxial Ru/Cu hybrid nanolayers with interface control.

The demonstration of the spin-charge conversion, especially with enhanced spin Hall conductivity, is crucial for the development of energy-efficient spintronic devices such as spin-orbital torque (SOT) based magnetoresistive random access memories. In this work, fully epitaxial Ru/Cu heterostructures were fabricated with interface engineering and nanolayer insertions consisting of Cu (1nm)/Ru (1nm) structures with different numbers of periods. The atomically controlled interface was confirmed by the high-resolution high-angle annular dark-field scanning transmission electron microscopy, and the epitaxial relationship persists even in the hybrid nanolayer insertion structures. The spin current generation was detected by the measurement of unidirectional spin Hall magnetoresistance, and the effective damping-like spin Hall efficiency (ξ_DL) was further quantitatively evaluated by the spin-torque ferromagnetic resonance with thickness dependence of the ferromagnetic layer. It is found that the sharp interface Ru/Cu film has a sizeable ξ_DL of -2.2% and the insertion of Cu/Ru nanolayers at the interface can increase the ξ_DL value to -3.7%. The former could be attributed to the interface spin-orbit filtering effect and the latter may be further understood by the intrinsic contribution from the local electronic structure tuning due to the lattice distortion near the interface. A large effective spin Hall conductivity is achieved to be (3~5)×10^5 ℏ/2eΩ^(-1)m^(-1) in the epitaxial Ru/Cu hybrid nanolayers, which is in the same range as that of platinum. This work indicates that the interfacial control with hybrid nanolayer structures can extend the SOT-based materials to highly conductive metals, even with weak spin-orbit interactions, toward high stability, low cost, and low energy consumption for spintronic applications.