All-electrical detection of the relative strength of Rashba and Dresselhaus spin-orbit interaction in quantum wires

TL;DR

This paper introduces a parameter-free, all-electrical method to measure the relative strength of Rashba and Dresselhaus spin-orbit interactions in quantum wires using conductance anisotropy under in-plane magnetic fields.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel, parameter-free technique to determine spin-orbit interaction strengths from conductance measurements in quantum wires, avoiding complex fitting procedures.

Findings

Method accurately determines spin-orbit strengths across various parameters.

Conductance anisotropy effectively reveals the relative Rashba and Dresselhaus contributions.

Numerical simulations confirm the method's broad applicability.

Abstract

We propose a method to determine the relative strength of Rashba and Dresselhaus spin-orbit interaction from transport measurements without the need of fitting parameters. To this end, we make use of the conductance anisotropy in narrow quantum wires with respect to the directions of an in-plane magnetic field, the quantum wire and the crystal orientation. We support our proposal by numerical calculations of the conductance of quantum wires based on the Landauer formalism which show the applicability of the method to a wide range of parameters.