Observation of electric current induced by optically injected spin current

Abstract

A normally incident light of linear polarization injects a pure spin current in a strip of 2-dimensional electron gas with spin-orbit coupling. We report observation of an electric current with a butterfly-like pattern induced by such a light shed on the vicinity of a crossbar shaped InGaAs/InAlAs quantum well. Its light polarization dependence is the same as that of the spin current. We attribute the observed electric current to be converted from the optically injected spin current caused by scatterings near the crossing. Our observation provides a realistic technique to detect spin currents, and opens a new route to study the spin-related science and engineering in semiconductors.

15 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Pure spin current from one-photon absorption of linearly polarized light in noncentrosymmetric semiconductors
• Electric Dipole Induced Spin Resonance in Disordered Semiconductors
• Deduction of Pure Spin Current from Spin Linear and Circular Photogalvanic Effect in Semiconductor Quantum Wells

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• Direct measurement of a pure spin current by a polarized light beam
• On the nature of steady states of spin distributions in the presence of spin-orbit interactions
• Spin-Current-Induced Charge Accumulation and Electric Current in Semiconductor Nanostructures with Rashba Spin-Orbit Coupling
• Current-induced Spin Polarization in Two-Dimensional Hole Gas
• Conductance plateau in quantum spin transport through an interacting quantum dot
• Spin Bias Measurement Based on a Quantum Point Contact