Magnetoconductance Anisotropies and Aharonov-Casher Phases

Abstract

The spin-orbit interaction is a key tool for manipulating and functionalizing spin-dependent electron transport. However, the precise value of the spin-orbit coupling constant is hard to determine and control. Here we propose a measurement of the geometric (Aharonov-Casher) phase of the electron wavefunction generated by the spin-orbit coupling as a means to deduce the spin-orbit coupling strength in weak links. Unlike other proposed measurements of geometric phases, which rely on interference, we show that the anisotropy of the magnetoconductance, measured at different directions of an external magnetic field,is determined by the geometric phase. Specifically we consider weak links in which the Rashba interaction is caused by an external electric field, but our method is expected to apply also for other forms of the spin-orbit coupling. Measuring this magnetoconductance anisotropy thus allows calibrating Rashba spintronic devices by an external electric field that tunes the spin-orbit interaction.

Published version

References in corpus (4)

• Coherent control of a single electron spin with electric fields
• Spin selectivity through time-reversal symmetric helical junctions
• Spin filtering in all-electrical three-terminal interferometers
• Nonmonotonic quantum phase gathering in curved spintronic circuits

Cited by in corpus (6)

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• Magnetization near a constriction between BCS superconductors by spin-dependent tunneling
• Electromagnetic response in dipole superfluids: vortex lattices and singular domain walls
• Spin qubit shuttling between coupled quantum dots with inhomogeneous Landé g-tensors