High field magneto-transport in high mobility gated InSb/InAlSb quantum well heterostructures

TL;DR

This study investigates high field magneto-transport in high mobility InSb/InAlSb quantum wells, revealing Rashba spin splitting effects and the influence of Landau level broadening on quantum oscillation patterns.

Contribution

It provides new insights into Rashba splitting parameters and the role of spin-dependent scattering in high mobility quantum wells at high magnetic fields.

Findings

Rashba splitting observed and quantified in InSb/InAlSb quantum wells.

Landau level broadening decreases with increasing carrier density.

Asymmetric peaks in Fourier transform linked to spin-dependent broadening.

Abstract

We present high field magneto-transport data from a range of 30nm wide InSb/InAlSb quantum wells. The low temperature carrier mobility of the samples studied ranged from 18.4 to 39.5 m2V-1s-1 with carrier densities between 1.5x1015 and 3.28x1015 m-2. Room temperature mobilities are reported in excess of 6 m2V-1s-1. It is found that the Landau level broadening decreases with carrier density and beating patterns are observed in the magnetoresistance with non-zero node amplitudes in samples with the narrowest broadening despite the presence of a large g-factor. The beating is attributed to Rashba splitting phenomenon and Rashba coupling parameters are extracted from the difference in spin populations for a range of samples and gate biases. The influence of Landau level broadening and spin-dependent scattering rates on the observation of beating in the Shubnikov-de Haas oscillations is investigated by simulations of the magnetoconductance. Data with non-zero beat node amplitudes are accompanied by asymmetric peaks in the Fourier transform, which are successfully reproduced by introducing a spin-dependent broadening in the simulations. It is found that the low-energy (majority) spin up state suffers more scattering than the high-energy (minority) spin down state and that the absence of beating patterns in the majority of (lower density) samples can be attributed to the same effect when the magnitude of the level broadening is large.