The nondissipative spin Hall current in a nonuniform Rashba effect system

The spin Hall current in a two-dimensional electron system with nonuniform Rashba spin–orbit interaction (SOI) is investigated by means of the lattice Green's function method. Large electric and spin Hall currents are produced by this nonuniform Rashba SOI, while the electric Hall current vanishes in the uniform Rashba SOI system. A nondissipative spin Hall current is also produced, without any longitudinal voltage bias, any external magnetic field and any special class of band insulators.     

Nonequilibrium spin Hall accumulation in ballistic semiconductor nanostructures

We demonstrate that the flow of a longitudinal unpolarized current through a ballistic two-dimensional electron gas with Rashba spin-orbit coupling will induce a nonequilibrium spin accumulation which has opposite signs for the two lateral edges and is, therefore, the principal observable signature of the spin Hall effect in two-probe semiconductor nanostructures. The magnitude of its out-of-plane component is gradually diminished by static disorder, while it can be enhanced by an in-plane transverse magnetic field. Moreover, our prediction of the longitudinal component of the spin Hall accumulation, which is insensitive to the reversal of the bias voltage, offers direct evidence to differentiate experimentally between the extrinsic, intrinsic, and mesoscopic spin Hall mechanisms.     

Charge Hall effect generated by spin-polarized current injected into Rashba spin orbit coupling media

Using the Keldysh Green’s function method, we study theoretically the electron accumulation induced by the inverse spin Hall effect in a spin valve structure in which a clean quantum wire formed from a 2D electron gas (2DEG) with Rashba/Dresselahaus spin orbit interaction (SOI) is connected to two ferromagnet electrodes. In a nonequilibrium situation when a spin current with an out-of plane (the 2DEG plane) spin polarization is driven through the SOI region by an external voltage, non-equilibrium electron accumulation or a Hall voltage forms at the two lateral sides of the quantum wire and exhibits an oscillation along the wire like the Rashba spin precession; the magnetization directions of FMs affect the Hall voltage and their parallel or antiparallel alignment along the normal direction of the 2DEG plane is most favorable to the Hall voltage. In an equilibrium situation, two planar magnetizations which are not collinear can generate an electron accumulation/a Hall voltage too. When one of the FM electrodes is replaced by a normal metal (NM), the electron accumulation is still present along the wire and its magnitude remains nearly unchanged in the biased case, whereas in the unbiased case it is reduced significantly and even vanishes.     

Persistent currents in a graphene ring with armchair edges

A graphene nanoribbon with armchair edges is known to have no edge state. However, if the nanoribbon is in the quantum spin Hall state, then there must be helical edge states. By folding a graphene ribbon into a ring and threading it by a magnetic flux, we study the persistent charge and spin currents in the tight-binding limit. It is found that, for a broad ribbon, the edge spin current approaches a finite value independent of the radius of the ring. For a narrow ribbon, inter-edge coupling between the edge states could open the Dirac gap and reduce the overall persistent currents. Furthermore, by enhancing the Rashba coupling, we find that the persistent spin current gradually reduces to zero at a critical value beyond which the graphene is no longer a quantum spin Hall insulator.     

Nonequilibrium spin-polarized transport through two parallel-coupled quantum dots

Spin-polarized transport through an Aharonov–Bohm ring containing two quantum dots (QDs) in each of its arms is studied by using the nonequilibrium Green’s function technique. We take both the Rashba spin-orbit interaction that exists in one of the QDs, and an inhomogeneous magnetic flux penetrating through the ring, into consideration. It is found that a 100% spin-polarized current can be driven out of the QDs ring, and both the spin directions and the magnitude of the outgoing current can be controlled. The origin of the pure spin-up or spin-down current is interpreted in terms of the spin accumulation in the QDs. This device is realizable by presently available technologies and can be used as a spin filter.     

Persistent current in a magnetized Rashba ring

We theoretically study the persistent currents flowing in a Rashba quantum ring subjected to the Rashba spin-orbit interaction. By introducing uniform or nonuniform magnetization into the ring, we find that a nonzero persistent charge current circulates in the ring, which stems from the original equilibrium spin current due to the Rashba spin-orbit interaction. Because of broken time reversal symmetry, the two oppositely flowing spin-up and spin-down charge currents of the equilibrium spin current are no longer equal, and so a net persistent charge current can flow in the system. It is also found that the persistent current can be modulated by the Fermi energy, the Rashba spin-orbit interaction strength and the magnetization in the ring. Moreover, the magnetization perpendicular to the ring plane can optimize the current. The persistent current flowing in the ring is a manifestation of the nonzero equilibrium spin current existing in the ring.     

Interfacial spin Hall current in a Josephson junction with Rashba spin—orbit coupling

We theoretically investigate the spin transport properties of the Cooper pairs in a conventional Josephson junction with Rashba spin-orbit coupling considered in one of the superconducting leads.It is found that an angle-resolved spin supercurrent flows through the junction and a nonzero interfacial spin Hall current driven by the superconducting phase difference also appears at the interface.The physical origin of this is that the Rashba spin-orbit coupling can induce a triplet order parameter in the s-wave superconductor.The interfacial spin Hall current dependences on the system parameters are also discussed.     

Spin cloud induced around an elastic scatterer by the intrinsic spin hall effect

Similar to the Landauer electric dipole created around an impurity by the electric current, a spin polarized cloud of electrons can be induced by the intrinsic spin Hall effect near a spin independent elastic scatterer. It is shown that in the ballistic range around the impurity, such a cloud appears in the case of Rashba spin-orbit interaction, even though the bulk spin Hall current is absent.     

Intrinsic Hall effect and separation of Rashba and Dresselhaus spin splittings in semiconductor quantum wells

We have proposed a method to separate Rashba and Dresselhaus spin splittings in semiconductor quantum wells by using the intrinsic Hall effect. It is shown that the interference between Rashba and Dresselhaus terms can deflect the electrons in opposite transverse directions with a change of sign in the macroscopic Hall current, thus providing an alternative way to determine the different contributions to the spin--orbit coupling.     

Temperature-controllable spin-polarized current and spin polarization in a Rashba three-terminal double-quantum-dot device

We propose a Rashba three-terminal double-quantum-dot device to generate a spin-polarized current and manipulate the electron spin in each quantum dot by utilizing the temperature gradient instead of the electric bias voltage. This device possesses a nonresonant tunneling channel and two resonant tunneling channels. The Keldysh nonequilibrium Green's function techniques are employed to determinate the spin-polarized current flowing from the electrodes and the spin accumulation in each quantum dot. We find that their signs and magnitudes are well controllable by the gate voltage or the temperature gradient. This result is attributed to the change in the slope of the transmission probability at the Fermi levels in the low-temperature region. Importantly, an obviously pure spin current can be injected into or extracted from one of the three electrodes by properly choosing the temperature gradient and the gate voltages. Therefore, the device can be used as an ideal thermal generator to produce a pure spin current and manipulate the electron spin in the quantum dot.     

Interplay of Rashba effect and spin Hall effect in perpendicular Pt/Co/MgO magnetic multilayers

The interplay of the Rashba effect and the spin Hall effect originating from current induced spin–orbit coupling was investigated in the as-deposited and annealed Pt/Co/MgO stacks with perpendicular magnetic anisotropy. The above two effects were analyzed based on Hall measurements under external magnetic fields longitudinal and vertical to dc current,respectively. The coercive field as a function of dc current in vertical mode with only the Rashba effect involved decreases due to thermal annealing. Meanwhile, spin orbit torques calculated from Hall resistance with only the spin Hall effect involved in the longitudinal mode decrease in the annealed sample. The experimental results prove that the bottom Pt/Co interface rather than the Co/MgO top one plays a more critical role in both Rashba effect and spin Hall effect.     

Electrically controllable spin transport in bilayer graphene with Rashba spin-orbit interaction

We study the spin transport in bilayer graphene nanoribbons (BGNs) in the presence of Rashba spin-orbit interaction (SOI) and external gate voltages. It is found that the spin polarization can be significantly enhanced by the interlayer asymmetry or longitudinal mirror asymmetry produced by external gate voltages. Rashba SOI alone in BGNs can only generate current with spin polarization along the in-plane y direction, but the polarization components can be found along the x, y and z directions when a gate voltage is applied. High spin polarization with flexible orientation is obtained in the proposed device. Our findings shed new light on the generation of highly spin-polarized current in BGNs without external magnetic fields, which could have useful applications in spintronics device design.     

半导体中自旋轨道耦合及自旋霍尔效应

本文主要评述和介绍半导体微结构中自旋轨道耦合的研究和最近的研究进展。我们细致地讨论了半导体微结构中自旋轨道耦合的物理起源和窄带隙半导体量子阱中的自旋霍尔效应。我们发现目前国际上广泛采用的线性Rashba模型在较大的电子平面波矢处失效:即自旋轨道耦合导致的能带自旋劈裂不再随电子波矢的增加而增加,而是开始下降,即出现强烈的非线性行为。这种非线性的行为起源于导带和价带间耦合的减弱。这种非线性行为还会导致电子的D’yakonov-Perel’自旋弛豫速率在较高能量处下降,与线性模型的结果完全相反。在此基础上,我们构造统一描述电子和空穴自旋霍尔效应的理论框架。我们的方法可以非微扰地计入自旋轨道耦合对本征自旋霍尔效应的影响。我们将此方法应用于强自旋轨道耦合的情形,即窄带隙CdHgTe/CdTe半导体量子阱。我们发现调节外电场或量子阱的阱宽可以作为导致量子相变和本征自旋霍尔效应的开关。我们的工作可能会为区别和实验验证本征自旋霍尔效应提供物理基础。     

Controllable Spin-Polarized Transport in a Three-Terminal Model

By means of the Keldysh Green's function method, we investigate the spin-polarized electron transport in a three-terminal device, which is composed of three normal metal leads and two serially-coupled quantum dots (QDs). The Rashba spin-orbit interaction (RSOI) is also considered in one of the QDs. We show that the spin-polarized charge current with arbitrary spin polarization can be obtained because of the quantum spin interference effect arising from the Rashba spin precession phase, and it can be modulated by the system parameters such as the applied external voltages, the RSOI strength, the QD levels, as well as the dot-lead coupling strengths. Moreover, a fully spin-polarized current or a pure spin current without any accompanying charge current can also be controlled to flow in the system. Our findings indicate that the proposed model can serve as an all-electrical spin device in spintronics field.     

Spin-polarized current through a lateral double quantum dot with spin–orbit interaction

We study the spin-polarized current through a vertical double quantum dot scheme. Both the Rashba spin–orbit (RSO) interaction inside one of the quantum dots and the strong intradot Coulomb interactions on the two dots are taken into account by using the second-quantized form of the Hamiltonian. Due to the existence of the RSO interaction, spin-up and spin-down electrons couple to the external leads with different strengths, and then a spin polarized current can be driven out of the middle lead by controlling a set of structure parameters and the external bias voltage. Moreover, by properly adjusting the dot levels and the external bias voltages, a pure spin current with no accompanying charge current can be generated in the weak coupling regime. We show that the difference between the intradot Coulomb interactions strongly influences the spin-polarized currents flowing through the middle lead and is undesirable in the generation of the net spin current. Based on the RSO interaction, the structure we propose can efficiently polarize the electron spin without the usage of any magnetic field or ferromagnetic material. This device can be used as a spin-battery and is realizable using the present available technologies.     

Polarized spin transport in mesoscopic quantum rings with electron--phonon and Rashba spin--orbit coupling

The influence of electron--phonon (EP) scattering on spin polarization of current output from a mesoscopic ring with Rashba spin--orbit (SO) interaction is numerically investigated. There are three leads connecting to the ring at different positions; unpolarized current is injected to one of them, and the other two are output channels with different bias voltages. The spin polarization of current in the outgoing leads shows oscillations as a function of EP coupling strength owing to the quantum interference of EP states in the ring region. As temperature increases, the oscillations are evidently suppressed, implying decoherence of the EP states. The simulation shows that the magnitude of polarized current is sensitive to the location of the lead. The polarized current depends on the connecting position of the lead in a complicated way due to the spin-sensitive quantum interference effects caused by different phases accumulated by transmitting electrons with opposite spin states along different paths.     

Resonant intrinsic spin hall effect in p-type GaAs quantum well structure

We study intrinsic spin Hall effect in p-type GaAs quantum well structure described by Luttinger Hamiltonian and a Rashba spin-orbit coupling arising from the structural inversion symmetry breaking. The Rashba term induces an energy level crossing in the lowest heavy hole subband, which gives rise to a resonant spin Hall conductance. The resonance may be used to identify the intrinsic spin Hall effect in experiments.     

金属表面Rashba自旋轨道耦合作用研究进展

自旋轨道耦合是电子自旋与轨道相互作用的桥梁, 它提供了利用外电场来调控电子的轨道运动、进而调控电子自旋状态的可能. 固体材料中有很多有趣的物理现象, 例如磁晶各向异性、自旋霍尔效应、拓扑绝缘体等, 都与自旋轨道耦合密切相关. 在表面/界面体系中, 由于结构反演不对称导致的自旋轨道耦合称为Rashba自旋轨道耦合, 它最早在半导体材料中获得研究, 并因其强度可由栅电压灵活调控而备受关注, 成为电控磁性的重要物理基础之一. 继半导体材料后, 金属表面成为具有Rashba自旋轨道耦合作用的又一主流体系. 本文以Au(111), Bi(111), Gd(0001)等为例综述了磁性与非磁性金属表面Rashba自旋轨道耦合的研究进展, 讨论了表面电势梯度、原子序数、表面态波函数的对称性, 以及表面态中轨道杂化等因素对金属表面Rashba自旋轨道耦合强度的影响. 在磁性金属表面, 同时存在Rashba自旋轨道耦合作用与磁交换作用, 通过Rashba自旋轨道耦合可能实现电场对磁性的调控. 最后, 阐述了外加电场和表面吸附等方法对金属表面Rashba自旋轨道耦合的调控. 基于密度泛函理论的第一性原理计算和角分辨光电子能谱测量是金属表面Rashba自旋轨道耦合的两大主要研究方法, 本文综述了这两方面的研究结果, 对金属表面Rashba自旋轨道耦合进行了深入全面的总结和分析.     

Nondissipative spin Hall effect via quantized edge transport

The spin Hall effect in a two-dimensional electron system on honeycomb lattice with both intrinsic and Rashba spin-orbit couplings is studied numerically. Integer quantized spin Hall conductance is obtained at the zero Rashba coupling limit when electron Fermi energy lies in the energy gap created by the intrinsic spin-orbit coupling, in agreement with recent theoretical prediction. While nonzero Rashba coupling destroys electron spin conservation, the spin Hall conductance is found to remain near the quantized value, being insensitive to disorder scattering, until the energy gap collapses with increasing the Rashba coupling. We further show that the charge transport through counterpropagating spin-polarized edge channels is well quantized, which is associated with a topological invariant of the system.     

Spin Hall effect and spin current generation in two-dimensional systems with random Rashba spin–orbit coupling

We consider a new effect induced by spin–orbit coupling in a two-dimensional electron gas confined in a semiconductor quantum well, i.e. the possibility of spin current generation by fluctuating random Rashba spin–orbit interaction, with the corresponding mean value of the interaction being equal to zero. Our main results suggest that – in contrast to the spatially uniform Rashba spin–orbit interaction – the spin Hall effect does not vanish for typical disorder strengths. We also point out some other possibilities of using such a random Rashba coupling for the generation of spin density and spin current in two-dimensional nonmagnetic structures.