Spin structure of spin-orbit split surface states in a magnetic material revealed by spin-integrated photoemission

The emergence of ferromagnetism in Rashba systems, where the evolving exchange interaction enters into competition with spin-orbit coupling, leads to a nontrivial spin-polarized electronic landscape with an intricate momentum-dependent spin structure, which is challenging to unveil. Here, we show a way to disentangle the contributions from the effective spin-orbit and exchange fields and thus to gain knowledge of the spin structure in ferromagnetic Rashba materials, which is required for spintronic applications. Our approach is based exclusively on spin-integrated photoemission measurements combined with a two-band modeling. As an example, we consider the mixed-valent material EuIr2Si2 which, while being nonmagnetic in the bulk, reveals strong ferromagnetism at the iridium-silicide surface where both spin-orbit and exchange magnetic interactions coexist. The combined effect of these interactions causes a complex band dispersion of the surface state which can be observed in photoemission experiments. Our method allows us to comprehensively unravel the surface-state spin structure driven by spin-orbit coupling at the ferromagnetic surface. This approach opens up opportunities to characterize the spin structure of ferromagnetic Rashba materials, especially where dedicated spin-resolved measurements remain challenging.This work was supported by Saint Petersburg State University (Grant No. ID 51126254) and the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (Grant No. 20-32-70127). We acknowledge financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy (No. MAT-2017-88374-P) and the German Research Foundation (DFG) through Grants No. LA655/20-1, No. KR3831/5-1, and Fermi-NEst. We acknowledge Diamond Light Source for access to beamline I05 (Proposals No. SI18844-1 and No. SI17761-1).Peer reviewe