Room-temperature spin injection and spin-to-charge conversion in a ferromagnetic semiconductor / topological insulator heterostructure

Abstract: Spin injection using ferromagnetic semiconductors at room temperature is a building block for the realization of spin-functional semiconductor devices. Nevertheless, this has been very challenging due to the lack of reliable room-temperature ferromagnetism in well-known group IV and III-V based semiconductors. Here, we demonstrate room-temperature spin injection by using spin pumping in a (Ga,Fe)Sb / BiSb heterostructure, where (Ga,Fe)Sb is a ferromagnetic semiconductor (FMS) with high Curie temperature (TC) and BiSb is a topological insulator (TI). Despite the very small magnetization of (Ga,Fe)Sb at room temperature (45 emu/cc), we are able to detect spin injection from (Ga,Fe)Sb by utilizing the inverse spin Hall effect (ISHE) in the topological surface states of BiSb with a large inverse spin Hall angle of 2.5. Our study provides the first demonstration of spin injection as well as spin-to-charge conversion at room temperature in a FMS/TI heterostructure.