After the discovery of graphene it was soon realized, that graphene is the perfect candidate for spintronics, due to its high mobility, low spin-orbit coupling and small or absent hyperfine fields. By now, spin relaxation lengths longer than 10 um have been demonstrated, which makes graphene an ideal platform to transfer spin information. The key question at the present stage, how the manipulation of spin can be achieved with graphene devices. ISpinText project targeted novel routes to add electric and magnetic control over the spin by introducing different spin textures in graphene. Spin textures are induced by developing various 2D proximity heterostructures, where graphene is combined with TMDCs, giant Rashba spin-orbit crystals, topological insulators (TIs) or magnetic insulators (MIs).

 

In iSpinText different ingredients of these heterostructures were fabricated and investigated first and novel spintronic devices were developed with their combination. Exfoliation of single layer of giant spin-orbit (SO) materials like BiTeI was demonstrated for the first time, and electronic properties of Tis, MIs and TMDCs were explored even under large doping with ionic gating technique. Our theoretical effort helped to understand the band structure of produced novel 2D layers, allowed to understand spin-orbit properties of advanced heterostructures like twisted graphene/TMDC stacks, or graphene/BiTeBr under strain for the first time. ISpinText delivered several spintronic functionalities at room temperature which are promising to be implemented into future graphene based spintronic applications: We demonstrated that Graphene/MoS2 heterostructures provide a building block in which the spin relaxation time can be tuned by orders of magnitudes with simple electric gating. BiTeBr as a giant Rashba spin-orbit material can replace conventional ferromagnets in spintronic devices as a spin injector with an attractive property that the orientation of the injected spin can be tuned by the direction of current flow, due to Rashba-Edelstein effect. We combined graphene with topological insulators in van der Waals heterostructures to demonstrate the emergence of a strong proximity-induced spin-orbit coupling in graphene, consequently giving rise to a giant and gatetunable spin galvanic effects at room temperature. Using graphene in heterostructure with a layered magnetic insulator CrGeTe, we also demonstrated proximity induced magnetic exchange interaction in graphene, with an anisotropic spin relaxation.