The spin Hall effect in single-crystalline gold thin films

The spin Hall effect has been investigated in 10-nm-thick epitaxial Au (001) single crystal films via H-pattern devices, whose minimum characteristic dimension is about 40 nm. By improving the film quality and optimizing the in-plane geometry parameters of the devices, we explicitly extract the spin Hall effect contribution from the ballistic and bypass contribution which were previously reported to be dominating the non-local voltage. Furthermore, we calculate a lower limit of the spin Hall angle of 0.08 at room temperature. Our results indicate that the giant spin Hall effect in Au thin films is dominated not by the interior defects scattering, but by the surface scattering. Besides, our results also provide an additional experimental method to determine the magnitude of spin Hall angle unambiguously. (paper)