Electron spin filtering in all-semiconductor tunneling structures

In this work we briefly review the present day perspectives for exploiting conventional non-magnetic semiconductor nano-technology to design high speed spin-filter devices. In recent theoretical investigations a high spin polarization has been predicted for the ballistic tunneling current in semiconductor single- and double-barrier asymmetric tunnel structures of III–V semiconductors with strong Rashba spin–orbit coupling. We show in this paper that the polarization in the tunneling can probability be sufficiently increased for producing realistic single-barrier structures by including of the Dresselhaus term into consideration.