Rashba spin-orbit interaction enhanced by graphene in-plane deformations

Abstract

Graphene consists in a single-layer carbon crystal where 2$p_z$ electrons display a linear dispersion relation in the vicinity of the Fermi level, conveniently described by a massless Dirac equation in $2+1$ spacetime. Spin-orbit effects open a gap in the band structure and offer perspectives for the manipulation of the conducting electrons spin. Ways to manipulate spin-orbit couplings in graphene have been generally assessed by proximity effects to metals that do not compromise the mobility of the unperturbed system and are likely to induce strain in the graphene layer. In this work we explore the $\mathrm{U}(1)\times \mathrm{SU}(2)$ gauge fields that result from the uniform stretching of a graphene sheet under a perpendicular electric field. Considering such deformations is particularly relevant due to the counter-intuitive enhancement of the Rashba coupling between 30-50% for small bond deformations well known from tight-binding and DFT calculations. We report the accessible changes that can be operated in the band structure in the vicinity of the K points as a function of the deformation strength and direction.

10 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (12)

• Electronic States of Graphene Nanoribbons
• A tight-binding approach to uniaxial strain in graphene
• All-graphene integrated circuits via strain engineering
• Spin-orbit coupling in curved graphene, fullerenes, nanotubes, and nanotube caps
• Proximity-induced ferromagnetism in graphene revealed by anomalous Hall effect
• Tuning laser-induced bandgaps in graphene
• Programmable Extreme Pseudomagnetic Fields in Graphene by a Uniaxial Stretch
• Low energy excitations in graphite: The role of dimensionality and lattice defects
• Gaussian deformations in graphene ribbons: flowers and confinement
• Gate-Tunable Exchange Coupling Between Cobalt Clusters on Graphene
• Gauge symmetry breaking and topological quantization for the Pauli Hamiltonian
• Ferromagnetic order induced on graphene by Ni/Co proximity effects

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Chiral tunneling in single layer graphene with Rashba spin-orbit coupling: spin currents