Effect of proximity-induced spin-orbit coupling in graphene mesoscopic billiards

Van der Waals heterostructures based on two-dimensional materials have recently become a very active topic of research in spintronics, both aiming at a fundamental description of spin dephasing processes in nanostructures and as a potential element in spin-based information processing schemes. Here, we theoretically investigate the magnetoconductance of mesoscopic devices built from graphene proximity-coupled to a high spin-orbit coupling material. Through numerically exact tight-binding simulations, we show that the interfacial breaking of inversion symmetry generates robust weak antilocalization even when the $z\to -z$ symmetric spin-orbit coupling in the quantum dot dominates over the Bychkov–Rashba interaction. Our findings are in interpreted on the light of random matrix theory, which links the observed behavior of quantum interference corrections to a transition from circular-orthogonal to circular-sympletic ensemble.