Observation of giant spin–orbit interaction in graphene and heavy metal heterostructures

Graphene is a promising material demonstrating some interesting phenomena such as the spin Hall effect, bipolar transistor effect, and non-trivial topological states. However, graphene has an intrinsically small spin–orbit interaction (SOI), making it difficult to apply in spintronic devices. The electronic band structure of graphene makes it possible to develop a systematic method to enhance SOI extrinsically. In this study, we designed a graphene field-effect transistor with a Pb layer intercalated between graphene (Gr) and Au layers and studied the effect on the strength of the SOI. The SOI in our system was significantly increased to 80 meV, which led to a giant non-local signal (∼180 Ω) at room temperature due to the spin Hall effect. Further, we extract key parameters of spin transport from the length and width dependence of non-local measurement. To support these findings, we also measured the temperature and gate-dependent weak localization (WL) effect. We obtained the magnitude of the SOI and spin relaxation time of Gr via quantitative analysis of WL. The SOI magnitudes estimated from the non-local signal and the WL effect are close in value. The enhancement of the SOI of Gr at room temperature is a potential simple manipulation method to explore the use of this material for spin-based applications.