Spin-Hall effect in semiconductor heterostructures with cubic Rashba spin-orbit interaction

TL;DR

This paper investigates the spin-Hall effect in semiconductor heterostructures with weak cubic Rashba spin-orbit interaction, deriving diffusion equations and analyzing edge spin-accumulation and Hall-like contributions to electric current.

Contribution

It provides explicit diffusion equations and spin-current expressions for systems with cubic Rashba interaction, linking spin diffusion and spin-current tensors in the diffusive regime.

Findings

Derived particle and spin diffusion equations.

Calculated edge spin-accumulation in spin-Hall experiments.

Identified a new Hall-like contribution to electric current.

Abstract

We study the spin-Hall effect in systems with weak cubic Rashba spin-orbit interaction. To this end we derive particle and spin diffusion equations and explicit expressions for the spin-current tensor in the diffusive regime. We discuss the impact of electric fields on the Green's functions and the diffusion equations and establish a relationship between the spin-current tensor and the spin diffusion equations for the model under scrutiny. We use our results to calculate the edge spin-accumulation in a spin-Hall experiment and show that there is also a new Hall-like contribution to the electric current in such systems.