Weak Antilocalization and Spin Hall Effect in Pt Films Doped with Molecular Spin

A high degree of tunability and versatility of organic chemistry has paved the way toward molecular engineering of electronic and spintronic devices. Here, we report molecular spin doping of a Pt film, the key material in spin orbitronics. The molecular spin doping using a monolayer of a metal terpyridine complex allows to control the interaction between the conduction electrons and localized magnetic moments in the Pt film. The interaction was probed by measuring the weak antilocalization, which demonstrates enhanced magnetic impurity scattering induced by the molecular spin doping. By measuring the spin–orbit torque generated by Pt doped with molecular spins, we found that the spin Hall effect is robust against the magnetic impurity scattering, showing that the significant spin–orbit coupling dominates the charge-to-spin conversion in Pt. These results demonstrate that the molecular spin doping paves the way to explore spin-orbitronics phenomena.