Theoretical study of topological materials for spintronics

Enabling highly efficient current-induced magnetization switching is critical to future spintronic applications, and many proposals relies on topological effects for the conversion of charge current to spin current. Recently, the intrinsic spin-Hall effect (SHE) in the topological materials has been intensely studied and was proposed to play a more important role in the field, because of their extremely large spin Berry curvature. Here, we carried out theoretical studies of different topological materials ranging from topological insulator, Dirac/Weyl semimetal, to topological superconductor, and calculated their intrinsic spin-Hall conductivity (SHC). The figure of merit for charge-to-spin conversion is defined as the SHC over the density of state, based on which we propose a family of topological materials for the spintronics devices.