Detection of the Orbital Hall Effect by the Orbital-Spin Conversion

The intrinsic orbital Hall effect (OHE), the orbital counterpart of the spin Hall effect, was predicted and studied theoretically for more than one decade, yet to be observed in experiments. Here we propose a strategy to convert the orbital current in OHE to the spin current via the spin-orbit coupling from the contact. Furthermore, we find that OHE can induce large nonreciprocal magnetoresistance when employing the magnetic contact. Both the generated spin current and the orbital Hall magnetoresistance can be applied to probe the OHE in experiments and design orbitronic devices.