Intrinsic and Rashba spin-orbit interactions in graphene sheets

By H. Min, Jason E. Hill, Nikolai Sinitsyn, B. Sahu, L. Kleinman, Allan H. MacDonald. 2006

785 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Starting from a microscopic tight-binding model and using second-order perturbation theory, we derive explicit expressions for the intrinsic and Rashba spin-orbit interaction induced gaps in the Dirac-like low-energy band structure of an isolated graphene sheet. The Rashba interaction parameter is first order in the atomic carbon spin-orbit coupling strength $\ensuremath{\xi}$ and first order in the external electric field $E$ perpendicular to the graphene plane, whereas the intrinsic spin-orbit interaction which survives at $E=0$ is second order in $\ensuremath{\xi}$. The spin-orbit terms in the low-energy effective Hamiltonian have the form proposed recently by Kane and Mele. Ab initio electronic structure calculations were performed as a partial check on the validity of the tight-binding model.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e563664e6a12c64d8c3b132033bfc01aabe4b63c

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Materials Chemistry

Citations in the corpus

Colloquium : Spintronics in graphene and other two-dimensional materials (2019, background): “Second-order perturbation theory gives (Huertas-Hernando et al., 2006; Konschuh et al., 2010; Min et al., 2006) ∆KM = s∆ 2 SO 18V 2spσ ≈ 1 µeV, (3) where Vspσ ≈ 4.2 eV represents the hopping between px,y and s orbitals, s ≈ −7.3 eV is the energy of the latter measured with respect to the intrinsic…”
Electronic properties of graphene in a strong magnetic field (2010, background): “…this model because the spin orientation is locked to a particular valley index via the term (223), the associated energy scale ∆SO ∼ 10 mK turns out to be van- ishingly small in graphene, whereas an extrinsic Rashbatype spin-orbit coupling in graphene can be on the order of 1 K (Min et al., 2006).”