Some members of the family of ferroelectric topological crystalline insulators have recently emerged as highly promising materials for fundamental studies in ferronics, spintronics, and orbitronics, as well as for applications because of their Rashba-like spin and orbital splitting in electronic structures and the possibility of voltage-controlled ferroelectric polarization for electrical control of the sign of the spin-orbital charge conversion. In this paper, we report the observation of strong orbital-to-charge conversion in one member of this family, namely SnTe. Ferromagnetic resonance driven spin and orbital pumping (spin-orbital pumping) experiments were performed in heterostructures containing one layer of SnTe with thicknesses varying in the range 3–20 nm and using different ferromagnetic layers to inject the spin and orbital currents (spin-orbital current) into the SnTe layer. The experiments are consistent with orbital-to-charge conversion in SnTe being predominantly governed by the inverse orbital Rashba-Edelstein effect (IOREE). These results suggest that topological surface states play an important role in the orbital-to-charge conversion. From the data for all samples, we obtain a negative IOREE parameter ${\lambda }_{\mathrm{IOREE}}=-29\pm 3.5$ pm, where the negative sign is consistent with a counterclockwise orbital configuration in the surface states. This value is more than one order of magnitude larger than its spin counterpart, consistent with theoretical predictions for a similar member of the family, namely GeTe. Our results corroborate the investigation of IOREE by the injection of spin-orbital currents in a ferroelectric topological crystalline insulator.

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• Spin pumping
• Spintronics
• Topological insulators
• Magnetic multilayers
• Topological materials
• Ferromagnetic resonance
• Sputtering
• X-ray diffraction