Emergent Rashba spin-orbit coupling in bulk gold with buried network of nanoscale interfaces

Abstract

The Rashba effect, which plays a crucial role in fundamental materials physics and potential spintronics applications, has been engineered in diverse systems, including semiconductor quantum wells, oxide heterostructures, metallic surfaces, topological insulators, ferroelectrics, etc. However, generating it in systems that preserve bulk inversion symmetry (BIS), for example, in bulk metals, has not been possible so far. We demonstrate a strategy to introduce and tune Rashba spin-orbit interaction (SOI) to unprecedented magnitudes in inversion-symmetric solids by incorporating ultrasmall silver nanoparticles in bulk gold. The near-identical lattice constants of Ag and Au allow dense packing of the Ag/Au hetero-interfaces without compromising the global BIS. By varying the density of embedded nanoparticles, we generate Rashba SOI in a bulk metal with coupling strength ~15 meV∙Å, higher than any known system preserving BIS globally, and show up to ~20 times increase in the spin-orbit scattering rate. We argue that the combined effect of charge transfer at the interfaces and polaronic localization enhances the SOI.