Enhanced spin Hall effect by electron correlations in CuBi alloys

A recent experiment in CuBi alloys obtained a large spin Hall angle (SHA) of -0.24 (Niimi et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 156602 (2012)). We find that the SHA can be dramatically enhanced by Bi impurities close to the Cu surface. The mechanisms of this enhancement are two-fold. One is that the localized impurity state on surface has a decreased hybridization and combined with Coulomb correlation effect. The other comes from the low-dimensional state of conduction electrons on surface, which results in a further enhancement of skew scattering by impurities. Furthermore, we note that a discrepancy in sign of SHA between the experiment and previous theories is simply caused by different definitions of SHA. This re-establishes skew scattering as the essential mechanism underlying the spin Hall effect in CuBi alloys.