Spin-orbit coupling in fluorinated graphene

We report on theoretical investigations of the spin-orbit coupling effects in fluorinated graphene. First-principles density functional calculations are performed for the dense and dilute adatom coverage limits. The dense limit is represented by the single-side semifluorinated graphene, which is a metal with spin-orbit splittings of about 10 meV. To simulate the effects of a single adatom, we also calculate the electronic structure of a 10 × 10 supercell, with one fluorine atom in the top position. Since this dilute limit is useful to study spin transport and spin relaxation, we also introduce a realistic effective hopping Hamiltonian, based on symmetry considerations, which describes the supercell bands around the Fermi level. We provide the Hamiltonian parameters which are best fits to the first-principles data. We demonstrate that, unlike for the case of hydrogen adatoms, fluorine’s own spin-orbit coupling is the principal cause of the giant induced local spin-orbit coupling in graphene. The sp3 hybridization induced transfer of spin-orbit coupling from graphene’s σ bonds, important for hydrogenated graphene, contributes much less. Furthermore, the magnitude of the induced spin-orbit coupling due to fluorine adatoms is about 1000 times more than that of pristine graphene, and 10 times more than that of hydrogenated graphene. Also unlike hydrogen, the fluorine adatom is not a narrow resonant scatterer at the Dirac point. The resonant peak in the density of states of fluorinated graphene in the dilute limit lies 260 meV below the Dirac point. The peak is rather broad, about 300 meV, making the fluorine adatom only a weakly resonant scatterer.