Many-body effects on the Rashba-type spin splitting in bulk bismuth tellurohalides

TL;DR

This paper investigates how many-body effects influence the Rashba-type spin splitting in bulk bismuth tellurohalides, showing that $GW$ corrections are essential for accurate interpretation of experimental results.

Contribution

The study demonstrates the significant impact of many-body $GW$ corrections on spin splitting calculations, improving the understanding of spin-orbit effects in bismuth tellurohalides.

Findings

$GW$ corrections modify the spin splitting values.

Many-body effects are crucial for interpreting experimental data.

Density functional theory underestimates spin splitting without $GW$ corrections.

Abstract

We report on many-body corrections to one-electron energy spectra of bulk bismuth tellurohalides---materials that exhibit a giant Rashba-type spin splitting of the band-gap edge states. We show that the corrections obtained in the one-shot $GW$ approximation noticeably modify the spin-orbit-induced spin splitting evaluated within density functional theory. We demonstrate that taking into account many-body effects is crucial to interpret the available experimental data.