Sobhan Subhra Mishra, James Lourembam, Dennis Jing Xiong Lin, Ranjan Singh. “Active Ballistic Orbital Transport in Ni/Pt heterostructure” Nature Communications 15, no. 1 (2024): 4568
Sobhan Subhra Mishra, James Lourembam, Dennis Jing Xiong Lin, Ranjan Singh. “Active Ballistic Orbital Transport in Ni/Pt heterostructure” Nature Communications 15, no. 1 (2024): 4568
Orbital current, defined as the orbital character of Bloch states in solids, can travel with larger coherence length through a broader range of materials than its spin counterpart, facilitating a robust, higher density and energy efficient information transmission. Hence, active control of orbital transport plays a pivotal role in the progress of the evolving field of quantum information technology. Unlike spin angular momentum, orbital angular momentum couples to phonon angular momentum efficiently via orbital-crystal momentum (L-k) coupling, allowing us to control orbital transport through crystal field potential mediated angular momentum transfer. Here, leveraging the orbital dependant efficient L-k coupling, we have experimentally demonstrated the active control of orbital current velocity in Ni/Pt heterostructure. We observe terahertz emission from Ni/Pt heterostructure via long-range ballistic orbital transport, as evidenced by the delay, and chirping in the emitted THz pulse correlating with increased Pt thickness. Additionally, we also have identified a critical energy density required to overcome collisions in orbital transport, enabling a swifter flow of orbital current. Femtosecond light driven active control of the ballistic orbital transport lays the foundation for the development of dynamic optorbitronics for transmitting information over extended distance.
Piyush Agarwal, Sobhan Subhra Mishra, Rohit Medwal, John Rex Mohan, Hironori Asada, Yasuhiro Fukuma, Ranjan Singh “Reconfigurable Chiral Spintronic THz Emitters” Advanced Optical Materials 2303128 (2024)
Collective spin arrangements manifest diverse spin textures, encompassing ferromagnetism, antiferromagnetism, and chiral vortices. However, mapping these spin textures in ultrathin magnetic multilayers has remained elusive. A reconfigurable chiral spintronic terahertz emission method is introduced through investigations on a model system of synthetic antiferromagnet and the spin information of individual ferromagnet (FM) layers is extracted. Upon femtosecond photoexcitation of the synthetic antiferromagnet (FM1/Ru/FM2), the ferromagnets generate a pair of linearly polarized ultrafast spin currents, which, after relaxation at the FM/Ru interface, emit corresponding THz pulses. The Ruderman–Kittel–Kasuya–Yosida interactions between the two FMs give rise to magnetic-field-controlled spin textures causing a spin relaxation imbalance at the interfaces and induce a phase shift between the orthogonal components of the emitted terahertz fields, consequently reconfiguring the polarization of the emitted terahertz field from linear to circular. This approach offers a novel means of investigating electronic and magnetic states in ultrathin spintronic heterostructures, low-dimensional quantum materials, topological insulators, and Weyl semimetals. Furthermore, it enables the exploration of spin textures, including skyrmions, merons, and solitons.