2005/03/31 by Branislav K. Nikolic, Branislav K. Nikolić, Liviu P. Zârbo +2 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Magnetic properties of thin films #Physics of Superconductivity and Magnetism #Quantum and electron transport phenomena #cond-mat.mes-hall
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevb.72.075335
published as Phys. Rev. B 72, 075335 (2005) · 5 pages, 4 color EPS figures; 2 new figures and expanded discussion on the sign of spin Hall quantities. To appear in Phys. Rev. B 72 (2005)
arxiv created 2005/06/23 · openalex publication_date 2005/08/12 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We introduce the spin- and momentum-dependent force operator, which is defined by the Hamiltonian of a clean semiconductor quantum wire with homogeneous Rashba spin-orbit (SO) coupling attached to two ideal (i.e., free of spin and charge interactions) leads. Its expectation value in the spin-polarized electronic wave packet injected through the leads explains why the center of the packet gets deflected in the transverse direction. Moreover, the corresponding spin density will be dragged along the transverse direction to generate an out-of-plane spin accumulation of opposite signs on the lateral edges of the wire, as expected in the phenomenology of the spin Hall effect, when spin-\ensuremath\uparrow and spin-\ensuremath\downarrow polarized packets (mimicking the injection of conventional unpolarized charge current) propagate simultaneously through the wire. We also demonstrate that spin coherence of the injected spin-polarized wave packet will gradually diminish (thereby diminishing the ``force'') along the SO coupled wire due to the entanglement of spin and orbital degrees of freedom of a single electron, even in the absence of any impurity scattering.