Spin accumulation with spin-orbit interaction

Abstract

Spin accumulation is a crucial but imprecise concept in spintronics. In metal-based spintronics it is characterized in terms of semiclassical distribution functions. In semiconductors with a strong spin-orbit coupling the spin accumulation is interpreted as a superposition of coherent eigenstates. Both views can be reconciled by taking into account the electron-electron interaction: a sufficiently strong self-consistent exchange field reduces a spin accumulation to a chemical potential difference between the two spin bands even in the presence of spin-orbit coupling. We demonstrate the idea on a clean two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) by showing how the exchange field protects a spin accumulation from dephasing and introduces an easy-plane anisotropy.

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References in corpus (6)

• Electrical Detection of Spin Transport in Lateral Ferromagnet-Semiconductor Devices
• Spin current and polarization in impure 2D electron systems with spin-orbit coupling
• Measurement of Rashba and Dresselhaus spin-orbit magnetic fields
• Rashba type spin-orbit splitting of quantum well states in ultrathin Pb films
• High temperature spin dephasing in n-typed GaAs quantum wells
• Intrinsic Spin Hall Edges

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Electron spin relaxation in bulk III-V semiconductors from a fully microscopic kinetic spin Bloch equation approach