Efficient spin accumulation carried by slow relaxons in chiral tellurium

DOI

Efficient conversion between charge currents and spin signals is crucial for realizing magnet-free spintronic devices. However, the strong spin-orbit coupling that enhances this conversion also causes rapid spin dissipation, making spin signals difficult to control. Although modern materials science offers novel systems with diverse spin configurations of conduction electrons, understanding their fundamental limitations requires insights into the mechanisms behind the creation and relaxation of spin populations. In this study, we demonstrate that parallel spin-momentum entanglement at the Fermi surface of chiral tellurium crystals gives rise to slow collective relaxation modes, termedrelaxons. These relaxons dominate the electrically generated spin and orbital angular momentumaccumulation in tellurium, achieving an extraordinary 50% conversion efficiency, and are responsible for a long lifetime of the spin population. We show that the slow relaxons carrying spin density closely resemble the persistent helical spin states observed in GaAs semiconductor quantum wells. This similarity suggests that slow relaxons are a general phenomenon, potentially present in other chiral materials with strong spin-momentum locking, and could be used to generate and transmit spin signals with low heat losses in future electronics.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.34894/MYORSD
Metadata Access https://dataverse.nl/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=doi:10.34894/MYORSD
Provenance
Creator Tenzin, Karma ORCID logo
Publisher DataverseNL
Contributor Groningen Digital Competence Centre; DataverseNL network
Publication Year 2025
Rights CC0-1.0; info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess; http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0
OpenAccess true
Contact Groningen Digital Competence Centre (rug.nl)
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Format text/markdown; text/x-python-script; text/plain
Size 2786; 29079; 2444; 8774; 2488; 1185; 2439; 2295; 2352; 2355; 1800; 2109; 2001; 2058; 2063; 6386; 3371; 3373; 935; 3445; 76; 934; 961
Version 1.0
Discipline Natural Sciences; Physics