Effective one-band approach for the spin splittings in quantum wells

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that a simplified one-band effective mass model accurately captures spin splittings in quantum wells, highlighting the comparable roles of interface and bulk Dresselhaus contributions, validated through tight-binding calculations.

Contribution

The study introduces an effective one-band approach that accurately models spin splittings, clarifying the relative importance of interface and bulk contributions in quantum wells.

Findings

The one-band model reproduces spin splitting dependencies on well width and electric field.

Interface contributions to spin-orbit interaction are comparable to bulk contributions in narrow wells.

Analytical and tight-binding results are in excellent agreement.

Abstract

The spin-orbit interaction of 2D electrons in the quantum wells grown from the III-V semiconductors consists of the two parts with different symmetry: the Bychkov-Rashba and the Dresselhaus terms. The last term is usually attributed to the bulk spin-orbit Hamiltonian which reflects the Td symmetry of the zincblende lattice. While it is known that the quantum well interfaces may also contribute to the Dresselhaus term, the exact structure and the relative importance of the interface and the bulk contributions are not well understood yet. To compare the bulk contribution with the interface one, we perform tight-binding calculations of the spin splittings of the electron levels in [100] GaAs/AlGaAs quantum wells and analyze the obtained spin splittings within the one-band effective mass electron Hamiltonian containing the two interface contributions to the Dresselhaus term. We show that the dependencies of the spin splittings on the quantum well width and the electric field along the growth direction are perfectly reproduced by the analytical one-band calculations and the magnitude of the interface contribution to the spin-orbit interaction for sufficiently narrow quantum wells is of the same order as the contribution from the bulk Dresselhaus Hamiltonian.