Thermoelectric effects in graphene with local spin-orbit interaction

Abstract

We investigate the transport properties of a graphene layer in the presence of Rashba spin-orbit interaction. Quite generally, spin-orbit interactions induce spin splittings and modifications of the graphene bandstructure. We calculate within the scattering approach the linear electric and thermoelectric responses of a clean sample when the Rashba coupling is localized around a finite region. We find that the thermoelectric conductance, unlike its electric counterpart, is quite sensitive to external modulations of the Fermi energy. Therefore, our results suggest that thermocurrent measurements may serve as a useful tool to detect nonhomogeneous spin-orbit interactions present in a graphene-based device. Furthermore, we find that the junction thermopower is largely dominated by an intrinsic term independently of the spin-orbit potential scattering. We discuss the possibility of cancelling the intrinsic thermopower by resolving the Seebeck coefficient in the subband space. This causes unbalanced populations of electronic modes which can be tuned with external gate voltages or applied temperature biases.

9 pages, 8 figures. The Eq.(27) and the definition of charge thermopower have been corrected

References in corpus (18)

• Electric Field Effect in Atomically Thin Carbon Films
• The electronic properties of graphene
• Chiral tunneling and the Klein paradox in graphene
• Andreev reflection and Klein tunneling in graphene
• Intrinsic and Rashba Spin-orbit Interactions in Graphene Sheets
• Spin-orbit coupling in curved graphene, fullerenes, nanotubes, and nanotube caps
• Thermoelectric and Magnetothermoelectric Transport Measurements of Graphene
• Observation of the Spin-Seebeck Effect in a Ferromagnetic Semiconductor
• Spin polarization of electrons by non-magnetic heterostructures : basics of spin-optics
• Fano-Rashba effect in a quantum wire
• Spin-resolved scattering through spin-orbit nanostructures in graphene
• Ballistic Spin Resonance
• Electronic properties of graphene and graphene nanoribbons with "pseudo-Rashba" spin-orbit coupling
• Strongly modulated transmission of a spin-split quantum wire with local Rashba interaction
• Rashba quantum wire: exact solution and ballistic transport
• Graphene p-n junctions with nonuniform Rashba spin-orbit coupling
• Robust strongly-modulated transmission of a $T$-shaped structure with local Rashba interaction
• Evanescent states in quantum wires with Rashba spin-orbit coupling

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Spin-dependent Seebeck effect and spin caloritronics in magnetic graphene
• Symmetries of quantum transport with Rashba spin-orbit: Graphene spintronics
• Spin and charge thermopower effects in the ferromagnetic graphene junction
• Seebeck effects in two-dimensional spin transistors
• Exact results relating spin-orbit interactions in two dimensional strongly correlated systems