Graded Orbital Interface Engineering for Enhanced Damping-like Torque Efficiency

Abstract

Orbitronics has emerged as a promising approach for generating orbital currents using low cost, abundant materials through the orbital Hall effect. Since orbital current cannot directly interact with the local magnetization of a conventional ferromagnet, a non-magnetic layer with strong spin orbit coupling is required for converting orbital current into spin current. However, the propagation of orbital current across the interface between an orbital source and an orbital to spin converter remains poorly understood. Here, we tuned the Ru/Pt orbital interface from an abrupt interface to a graded interface by introducing a controlled RuPt intermixed layer and quantified the resulting damping like torque efficiencies. A small, intermixed thickness of 0.26 nm enhances the damping like torque efficiency by 15% compared with the abrupt Ru/Pt interface and by 70% compared with the Pt reference. Further increasing the intermixing thickness progressively suppresses the torque efficiency. We attribute this nonmonotonic behavior to the competition between enhanced orbital transmission through a gradual crystal field transition and orbital current dephasing due to alloy disorder and scattering. Our results demonstrate that the orbital-source/converter interface is an active element for controlling orbital transport and provides an experimentally accessible approach for optimizing orbital current transmission and torque generation in orbitronic heterostructures.