Electron beam formation from spin-orbit interactions in zincblende semiconductor quantum wells

Abstract

We find a dramatic enhancement of electron propagation along a narrow range of real-space angles from an isotropic source in a two-dimensional quantum well made from a zincblende semiconductor. This ``electron beam'' formation is caused by the interplay between spin-orbit interaction originating from a perpendicular electric field to the quantum well and the intrinsic spin-orbit field of the zincblende crystal lattice in a quantum well, in situations where the two fields are different in strength but of the same order of magnitude. Beam formation is associated with caustics and can be described semi-classically using a stationary phase analysis.

References in corpus (6)

• Dissipationless Quantum Spin Current at Room Temperature
• An Exact SU(2) Symmetry and Persistent Spin Helix in a Spin-Orbit Coupled System
• Emergence of the persistent spin helix in semiconductor quantum wells
• Anisotropic current-induced spin accumulation in the two-dimensional electron gas with spin-orbit coupling
• Anisotropic magnetoresistance of spin-orbit coupled carriers scattered from polarized magnetic impurities
• Explicit Green functions for spin-orbit Hamiltonians

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Magnetic-field-driven topological transitions in non-centrally-symmetric energy spectrum of 2D electron gas with Rashba-Dresselhaus spin-orbit interaction
• Von Neumann spin measurements with Rashba fields
• Measurement of non-commuting spin components using spin-orbit interaction
• Quasiparticle velocities in 2D electron/hole liquids with spin-orbit coupling
• Spin-orbit interaction induced singularity of the charge density relaxation propagator
• Exact and quasiclassical Green's functions of two-dimensional electron gas with Rashba-Dresselhaus spin-orbit interaction in parallel magnetic field