Symmetry-Assisted Protection and Compensation of Hidden Spin Polarization in Centrosymmetric Systems*This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 11874195), the Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Computational Science and Material Design (Grant No. 2019B030301001), and the Center for Computational Science and Engineering of SUSTech.

Abstract

It was recently noted that in certain nonmagnetic centrosymmetric compounds, spin–orbit interactions couple each local sector that lacks inversion symmetry, leading to visible spin polarization effects in the real space, dubbed “hidden spin polarization (HSP)". However, observable spin polarization of a given local sector suffers interference from its inversion partner, impeding material realization and potential applications of HSP. Starting from a single-orbital tight-binding model, we propose a nontrivial way to obtain strong sector-projected spin texture through the vanishing hybridization between inversion partners protected by nonsymmorphic symmetry. The HSP effect is generally compensated by inversion partners near the Γ point but immune from the hopping effect around the boundary of the Brillouin zone. We further summarize 17 layer groups that support such symmetry-assisted HSP and identify hundreds of quasi-2D materials from the existing databases by first-principle calculations, among which a group of rare-earth compounds LnIO (Ln = Pr, Nd, Ho, Tm, and Lu) serves as great candidates showing strong Rashba- and Dresselhaus-type HSP. Our findings expand the material pool for potential spintronic applications and shed light on controlling HSP properties for emergent quantum phenomena.