Strong influence of spin-orbit coupling on magnetotransport in two-dimensional hole systems

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that magnetotransport measurements in 2D hole systems reveal strong signatures of spin-orbit coupling, enabling direct extraction of the spin-orbit coefficient for spin manipulation and quantum computing.

Contribution

It shows how magnetotransport properties in 2D hole systems can be used to quantify spin-orbit interactions, providing a new experimental approach.

Findings

Magnetotransport exhibits second-order spin-orbit effects.

Non-linear dependence of Hall coefficient on carrier density.

Proposed experimental setup for direct measurement of spin-orbit coefficient.

Abstract

With a view to electrical spin manipulation and quantum computing applications, recent significant attention has been devoted to semiconductor hole systems, which have very strong spin-orbit interactions. However, experimentally measuring, identifying, and quantifying spin-orbit coupling effects in transport, such as electrically-induced spin polarizations and spin-Hall currents, are challenging. Here we show that the magnetotransport properties of two dimensional (2D) hole systems display strong signatures of the spin-orbit interaction. Specifically, the low-magnetic field Hall coefficient and longitudinal conductivity contain a contribution that is second order in the spin-orbit interaction coefficient and is non-linear in the carrier number density. We propose an appropriate experimental setup to probe these spin-orbit dependent magnetotransport properties, which will permit one to extract the spin-orbit coefficient directly from the magnetotransport.