We study the effect of impurities in inducing spin-orbit coupling in graphene. We show that the sp3 distortion induced by an impurity can lead to a large increase in the spin-orbit coupling with a value comparable to the one found in diamond and other zinc-blende semiconductors. The spin-flip scattering produced by the impurity leads to spin scattering lengths of the order found in recent exper...

We present a formulation of electromagnetic spin-orbit coupling in magneto-optic media, and propose an alternative source of spin-orbit coupling to non-paraxial optics vortices. Our treatment puts forth a formulation of nonreciprocal transverse-spin angular-momentum-density shifts for evanescent waves in magneto-optic waveguide media. It shows that magnetization-induced electromagnetic spin-orb...

We study the coherent transport of heavy holes through a one-dimensional ring in the presence of spin-orbit coupling. Spin-orbit interaction of holes, cubic in the in-plane components of momentum, gives rise to an angular momentum dependent spin texture of the eigenstates and influences transport. We analyze the dependence of the resulting differential conductance of the ring on hole polarizati...

Spin-orbit coupling results in technologically-crucial phenomena underlying magnetic devices like magnetic memories and energy-efficient motors. In heavy element materials, the strength of spin-orbit coupling becomes large to affect the overall electronic nature and induces novel states such as topological insulators and spin-orbit-integrated Mott states. Here we report an unprecedented charge-...

The nature of chemical bonds in heavy main-group diatomics is discussed from the viewpoint of effective bond orders, which are computed from spin-orbit wave functions resulting from spin-orbit configuration interaction calculations. The reliability of the relativistic correlated wave functions obtained in such two-step spin-orbit coupling frameworks is assessed by benchmark studies of the spect...

We present a first-principles study of spin-orbit coupling effects on the Fermi surface of Sr2RuO4 and Sr2RhO4. For nearly degenerate bands, spin-orbit coupling leads to a dramatic change of the Fermi surface with respect to nonrelativistic calculations; as evidenced by the comparison with experiments on Sr2RhO4, it cannot be disregarded. For Sr2RuO4, the Fermi surface modifications are more su...

The three dimensional topological insulator bismuth selenide (Bi(2)Se(3)) is expected to possess strong spin-orbit coupling and spin-textured topological surface states and, thus, exhibit a high charge to spin current conversion efficiency. We evaluate spin-orbit torques in Bi(2)Se(3)/Co(40)Fe(40)B(20) devices at different temperatures by spin torque ferromagnetic resonance measurements. As the...

We study trapped 2D atomic Bose-Einstein condensates with spin-independent interactions in the presence of an isotropic spin-orbit coupling, showing that a rich physics results from the nontrivial interplay between spin-orbit coupling, confinement and interatomic interactions. For low interactions two types of half-vortex solutions with different winding occur, whereas strong-enough repulsive i...

Synthetic spin-orbit coupling in ultracold atomic gases can be taken to extremes rarely found in solids. We study a two dimensional Hubbard model of bosons in an optical lattice in the presence of spin-orbit coupling strong enough to drive direct transitions from Mott insulators to superfluids. Here we find phase-modulated superfluids with finite momentum that are generated entirely by spin-orb...

The vibronic and spin-orbit-induced interactions among the (3)Sigma(-), (1)Delta, and (1)Sigma(+) electronic states arising from a half-filled pi orbital of a linear triatomic molecule are considered, employing the microscopic (Breit-Pauli) spin-orbit coupling operator. The 6 x 6 Hamiltonian matrix is derived in a diabatic spin-orbital electronic basis set, including terms up to fourth order in...