Spin Hall effect at interfaces between HgTe/CdTe quantum wells and metals

Abstract

We study the spin-dependent transmission through interfaces between a HgTe/CdTe quantum well (QW) and a metal - both for the normal metal and the superconducting case. Interestingly, we discover a new type of spin Hall effect at these interfaces that happens to exist even in the absence of structure and bulk inversion asymmetry within each subsystem (i.e. the QW and the metal). Thus, this is a pure boundary spin Hall effect which can be directly related to the existence of exponentially localized edge states at the interface. We demonstrate how this effect can be measured and functionalized for an all-electric spin injection into normal metal leads.

7 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (9)

• Quantum Spin Hall Effect and Topological Phase Transition in HgTe Quantum Wells
• Quantum Spin Hall Insulator State in HgTe Quantum Wells
• Topological Insulators with Inversion Symmetry
• Dissipationless Quantum Spin Current at Room Temperature
• Quantum-limited shot noise in graphene
• Specular Andreev reflection in graphene
• Single valley Dirac fermions in zero-gap HgTe quantum wells
• Observation of intrinsic inverse spin Hall effect
• Giant mesoscopic spin Hall effect on surface of topological insulator

Cited by in corpus (12)

• Charge transport in pn and npn junctions of silicene
• Spin-helical transport in normal and superconducting topological insulators
• Spin-dependent thermoelectric transport in HgTe/CdTe quantum wells
• Anomalous spin precession and spin Hall effect in semiconductor quantum wells
• Strong Coupling Expansion of the Extended Hubbard Model with Spin-Orbit Coupling
• Evidence on the macroscopic length scale spin coherence for the edge currents in a narrow HgTe quantum well
• Transversal Propagation Behaviors of Helical Edge States In a QSH System
• Topological Superconductivity without Proximity Effect
• Conductance oscillations at the interface between a superconductor and the helical edge channel in a narrow HgTe quantum well
• Zener tunneling isospin Hall effect in HgTe quantum wells and graphene multilayers
• Bulk transport through superconducting hybrid structures in HgTe quantum wells
• Interplay between evanescent scattering modes and finite dispersion in superconducting junctions