A prohibition of equilibrium spin currents in multi-terminal ballistic devices

Abstract

We show that in the multi-terminal ballistic devices with intrinsic spin-orbit interaction connected to normal metal contacts there are no equilibrium spin currents present at any given electron energy. Obviously, this statement holds also after the integration over all occupied states. Based on the proof of this fact, a number of scenarios involving nonequilibrium spin currents is identified and further analyzed. In particular, it is shown that an arbitrary two-terminal device cannot polarize transient current. The same is true for the output terminal of an N-terminal device when all N-1 inputs are connected in parallel.

3 pages, 1 figure; presented at the DARPA SPinS review (#Th-19), San Francisco, CA, October 25-28, 2004

References in corpus (11)

• Universal Intrinsic Spin-Hall Effect
• Dissipationless Quantum Spin Current at Room Temperature
• Spin current and polarization in impure 2D electron systems with spin-orbit coupling
• Suppression of the Persistent Spin Hall Current by Defect Scattering
• Pure spin currents and associated electrical voltage
• Dissipation effects in spin-Hall transport of electrons and holes
• Sum rules for spin-Hall conductivity cancelation
• Spin Current Generation and Detection in the Presence of AC Gate
• T-shaped spin filter with a ring resonator
• Spin rotation for ballistic electron transmission induced by spin-orbit interaction
• Magnetic Scanning Tunneling Microscopy with a Two-Terminal Non-Magnetic Tip: Quantitative Results

Cited by in corpus (33)

• Advances and challenges in single-molecule electron transport
• Quantum transport in Rashba spin-orbit materials: A review
• A Chirality-Based Quantum Leap
• Imaging mesoscopic spin Hall flow: Spatial distribution of local spin currents and spin densities in and out of multiterminal spin-orbit coupled semiconductor nanostructures
• Spin-dependent transport through a chiral molecule in the presence of spin-orbit interaction and non-unitary effects
• Mesoscopic Spin Hall Effect in Multiprobe Ballistic Spin-Orbit Coupled Semiconductor Bridges
• Detecting chirality in two-terminal electronic devices
• Spin Hall Effect
• Unusual Spin Polarization in the Chirality Induced Spin Selectivity
• Enhancement of polarization in a spin-orbit coupling quantum wire with a constriction
• Spin polarized current generation from quantum dots without magnetic fields
• Zeeman ratchets: pure spin current generation in mesoscopic conductors with non-uniform magnetic fields
• Multichannel effects in Rashba quantum wires
• Spin-polarized electric currents in quantum transport through tubular two-dimensional electron gases
• Measuring Spin Accumulations with Current Noise
• Spin accumulation without spin current
• Spin-to-Charge Conversion of Mesoscopic Spin Currents
• Chiral cavity induced spin selectivity
• Fluctuations of spin transport through chaotic quantum dots with spin-orbit coupling
• Some symmetry properties of spin currents and spin polarizations in multi-terminal mesoscopic spin-orbit coupled systems
• Quantum Dot Spin Filter in Resonant Tunneling and Kondo Regimes
• Local equilibrium charge and spin currents in two-dimensional topological systems
• Non-linear spin to charge conversion in mesoscopic structures
• Universal Features of Spin Transport and Breaking of Unitary Symmetries
• Floquet-engineered chiral-induced spin selectivity
• Scattering Theory of Current-Induced Spin Polarization
• Non-Equilibrium Green's Function based Circuit Models for Coherent Spin Devices
• Universal Spin Dynamics in Quantum Wires
• Detection of spin injection into a double quantum dot: Violation of magnetic-field-inversion symmetry of nuclear polarization instabilities
• Generation of spin-polarized current using multi-terminated quantum dot with spin-orbit interaction
• Dipole-like dynamical nuclear spin polarization around a quantum point contact
• Oscillating spin-orbit interaction as a source of spin-polarized wave packets in two-terminal nanoscale devices
• Spin filtering on a ring with Rashba hamiltonian