Magnetoconductance correction in zinc-blende semiconductor nanowires with spin-orbit coupling

Abstract

We study the effects of spin-orbit coupling on the magnetoconductivity in diffusive cylindrical semiconductor nanowires. Following up on our former study on tubular semiconductor nanowires, we focus in this paper on nanowire systems where no surface accumulation layer is formed but instead the electron wave function extends over the entire cross section. We take into account the Dresselhaus spin-orbit coupling resulting from a zinc-blende lattice and the Rashba spin-orbit coupling, which is controlled by a lateral gate electrode. The spin relaxation rate due to Dresselhaus spin-orbit coupling is found to depend neither on the spin density component nor on the wire growth direction and is unaffected by the radial boundary. In contrast, the Rashba spin relaxation rate is strongly reduced for a wire radius that is smaller than the spin precession length. The derived model is fitted to the data of magnetoconductance measurements of a heavily doped back-gated InAs nanowire and transport parameters are extracted. At last, we compare our results to previous theoretical and experimental studies and discuss the occurring discrepancies.

11 pages, 5 figures, to be published in Phys. Rev. B

References in corpus (5)

• Signatures of Majorana fermions in hybrid superconductor-semiconductor nanowire devices
• Strong tuning of Rashba spin orbit interaction in single InAs nanowires
• Strong and Tunable Spin-Orbit Coupling of One-Dimensional Holes in Ge/Si Core/Shell Nanowires
• Magnetotransport properties of individual InAs nanowires
• Boundary scattering effects on magnetotransport of narrow metallic wires and films

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Dresselhaus spin-orbit coupling in [111]-oriented semiconductor nanowires
• Electrical tuning of the spin-orbit interaction in nanowire by transparent ZnO gate grown by atomic layer deposition
• Reliable modeling of weak antilocalization for accurate spin-lifetime extraction