  The entanglement of the charge, spin and orbital degrees of freedom can give
rise to emergent behavior especially in thin films, surfaces and interfaces.
Often, materials that exhibit those properties require large spin orbit
coupling. We hypothesize that the emergent behavior can also occur due to spin,
electron and phonon interactions in widely studied simple materials such as Si.
That is, large intrinsic spin-orbit coupling is not an essential requirement
for emergent behavior. The central hypothesis is that when one of the specimen
dimensions is of the same order (or smaller) as the spin diffusion length, then
non-equilibrium spin accumulation due to spin injection or spin-Hall effect
(SHE) will lead to emergent phase transformations in the non-ferromagnetic
semiconductors. In this experimental work, we report spin mediated emergent
antiferromagnetism and metal insulator transition in a Pd (1 nm)/Ni81Fe19 (25
nm)/MgO (1 nm)/p-Si (~400 nm) thin film specimen. The spin-Hall effect in p-Si,
observed through Rashba spin-orbit coupling mediated spin-Hall
magnetoresistance behavior, is proposed to cause the spin accumulation and
resulting emergent behavior. The phase transition is discovered from the
diverging behavior in longitudinal third harmonic voltage, which is related to
the thermal conductivity and heat capacity.
