Can Non-Equilibrium Spin Hall Accumulation be Induced in Ballistic Nanostructures?

Abstract

We demonstrate that flow of longitudinal unpolarized current through a ballistic two-dimensional electron gas with Rashba spin-orbit coupling will induce nonequilibrium spin accumulation which has opposite sign for the two lateral edges and it is, therefore, the principal observable signature of the spin Hall effect in two-probe semiconductor nanostructures. The magnitude of its out-of-plane component is gradually diminished by static disorder, while it can be enhanced by an in-plane transverse magnetic field. Moreover, our prediction of the longitudinal component of the spin Hall accumulation, which is insensitive to the reversal of the bias voltage, offers a smoking gun to differentiate experimentally between the extrinsic, intrinsic, and mesoscopic spin Hall mechanisms.

5 pages, 3 color EPS figures; published version

References in corpus (3)

• Spin current and polarization in impure 2D electron systems with spin-orbit coupling
• SU(2) Non-Abelian Holonomy and Dissipationless Spin Current in Semiconductors
• Decoherence of transported spin in multichannel spin-orbit coupled spintronic devices: Scattering approach to spin density matrix from the ballistic to the localized regime

Cited by in corpus (11)

• Theory of Spin Hall conductivity in n-doped GaAs
• Imaging mesoscopic spin Hall flow: Spatial distribution of local spin currents and spin densities in and out of multiterminal spin-orbit coupled semiconductor nanostructures
• Mesoscopic Spin Hall Effect in Multiprobe Ballistic Spin-Orbit Coupled Semiconductor Bridges
• Intrinsic Spin Hall Edges
• Small-angle impurity scattering and the spin Hall conductivity in 2D systems
• Spin Accumulation and Equilibrium Currents at the Edge of 2DEGs with Spin-Orbit Coupling
• Transverse Spin-Orbit Force in the Spin Hall Effect in Ballistic Semiconductor Wires
• Polarized Electric Current in Semiclassical Transport with Spin-Orbit Interaction
• Spin accumulation in ballistic Rashba bar
• Spin Hall effect in a Doped Mott Insulator
• Numerical Study of the Spin Hall Conductance in the Luttinger Model