Numerical Study of the Spin Hall Conductance in the Luttinger Model

TL;DR

This paper numerically investigates how disorder affects the intrinsic spin Hall conductance in a 3D lattice Luttinger model, revealing its robustness and eventual suppression before localization occurs.

Contribution

First numerical analysis of disorder effects on spin Hall conductance in a 3D lattice Luttinger model, highlighting its persistence and decay with increasing disorder.

Findings

Spin Hall conductance remains finite over a wide disorder range

Conductance decreases monotonically with disorder strength

Conductance vanishes before Anderson localization occurs

Abstract

We present first numerical studies of the disorder effect on the recently proposed intrinsic spin Hall conductance in a three dimensional (3D) lattice Luttinger model. The results show that the spin Hall conductance remains finite in a wide range of disorder strength, with large fluctuations. The disorder-configuration-averaged spin Hall conductance monotonically decreases with the increase of disorder strength and vanishes before the Anderson localization takes place. The finite-size effect is also discussed.