Measurement of Rashba and Dresselhaus spin-orbit magnetic fields

By L. Meier, Gian Salis, Ivan Shorubalko, E. Gini, S. Schoen, Klaus Ensslin. 2007

219 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Spin–orbit coupling is a manifestation of special relativity. In the reference frame of a moving electron, electric fields transform into magnetic fields, which interact with the electron spin and lift the degeneracy of spin-up and spin-down states. In solid-state systems, the resulting spin–orbit fields are referred to as Dresselhaus and Rashba fields, depending on whether the electric fields originate from bulk or structure inversion asymmetry, respectively. Yet, it remains a challenge to determine the absolute value of both contributions in a single sample. Here, we show that both fields can be measured by optically monitoring the angular dependence of the electrons’ spin precession on their direction of motion with respect to the crystal lattice. Furthermore, we demonstrate spin resonance induced by the spin–orbit fields. We apply our method to GaAs/InGaAs quantum-well electrons, but it should be universally useful to characterize spin–orbit interactions in semiconductors, and therefore could facilitate the design of spintronic devices.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/41fc3572a57acb039abe0960b16830265e070c46

Citations in the corpus

• Artificial gauge fields in materials and engineered systems (2017, unknown): “where the weights α and β can be independently measured [322,323] and their ratio can be tuned using additional gate control over the electron confinement [321,324] and density [325,326].”