We theoretically investigate photoinduced phenomena induced by time-periodic driving fields in two-dimensional electron gases under perpendicular magnetic fields with Rashba spin-orbit coupling. Using perturbation theory, we provide analytical results for the Floquet-Landau energy spectrum appearing due to THz radiation. By employing the resulting photo-modulated states, we compute the dynamical evolution of the spin polarization function for an initially prepared coherent state. We find that the interplay of the magnetic field, Rashba spin-orbit interaction and THz radiation can lead to inversion of the spin polarization. The dynamics also induces fractional revivals and non-trivial beating patterns in the autocorrelation function due to interference of the photo-modulated quantum states. We also calculate the transverse photo-assisted conductivity in the linear response regime using Kubo formalism and analyze the impact of the radiation field and Rashba spin-orbit interaction. In the static limit, we find that our results reduce to well-known expressions of the conductivity in non-relativistic and quasi-relativistic (topological insulator surfaces) two-dimensional electron gas thoroughly described in the literature. We discuss the possible experimental detection of our theoretical prediction and their relevance for spin-orbit physics at high magnetic fields.
We study the band structure modulation and spin-Hall effect of a two-dimensional heavy-hole system with $k^3$-Rashba spin-orbit coupling (RSOC), irradiated by linearly polarized light. We find that the band structure becomes anisotropic under the illumination by the light. Most remarkably, a pair of additional spin-degeneracy points (apart from $Γ$ point) emerge in the energy dispersion, the locations of which are solely determined by the strength of the amplitude of the incident light. If this degeneracy occurs around the Fermi level, the spin-Hall conductivity (SHC) exhibits a resonance. Awa…
At interfaces with inversion symmetry breaking, Rashba effect couples the motion of electrons to their spin; as a result, spin-charge interconversion mechanism can occur. These interconversion mechanisms commonly exploit Rashba spin splitting at the Fermi level by spin pumping or spin torque ferromagnetic resonance. Here, we report evidence of significant photoinduced spin to charge conversion via Rashba spin splitting in an unoccupied state above the Fermi level at the Cu(111)/$α$-Bi$_{2}$O$_{3}$ interface. We predict an average Rashba coefficient of $1.72\times 10^{-10}eV.m$ at 1.98 eV above…
We propose an experimental realization of the Spin Hall effect in graphene by illuminating a graphene sheet on top of a substrate with circularly polarized monochromatic light. The substrate induces a controllable Rashba type spin-orbit coupling which breaks the spin-degeneracy of the Dirac cones but it is gapless. The circularly polarized light induces a gap in the spectrum and turns graphene into a Floquet topological insulator with spin dependent edge states. By analyzing the high and intermediate frequency regimes, we find that in both parameter limits, the spin-Chern number can be tuned b…
Our recent study [Phys. Rev. B 103, 085309 (2021)] verified the existence of $\bf{k}$-linear Rashba spin-orbit coupling (SOC) of two-dimensional hole gases in quantum wells (QWs) which originates from a combination of heavy-hole-light-hole (HH-LH) mixing and direct dipolar coupling to the external electric field. However, the Rashba SOC dependence on QW orientations remains unclear. Here, we explore this dependence on QW orientations and uncover an upper and lower bound to the orientation-dependent $\bf{k}$-linear Rashba SOC along the [110]- and [111]- crystalline directions by performing atom…
We discuss the transport properties of a disordered two-dimensional electron gas with strong Rashba spin-orbit coupling. We show that in the high-density regime where the Fermi energy overcomes the energy associated with spin-orbit coupling, dc transport is accurately described by a standard Drude's law, due to a non-trivial compensation between the suppression of back-scattering and the relativistic correction to the quasi-particle velocity. On the contrary, when the system enters the opposite dominant spin-orbit regime, Drude's paradigm breaks down and the dc conductivity becomes strongly se…
Two-dimensional hole gases in semiconductor quantum wells are promising platforms for spintronics and quantum computation but suffer from the lack of the $\bf{k}$-linear term in the Rashba spin-orbit coupling (SOC), which is essential for spin manipulations without magnetism and commonly believed to be a $\bf{k}$-cubic term as the lowest order. Here, contrary to conventional wisdom, we uncover a strong and tunable $\bf{k}$-linear Rashba SOC in two-dimensional hole gases (2DHG) of semiconductor quantum wells by performing atomistic pseudopotential calculations combined with an effective Hamilto…
Anisotropic universal conductance fluctuations in disordered quantum wires with Rashba and Dresselhaus spin-orbit interaction and applied in-plane magnetic field
We theoretically study the impacts of linear spin-orbit coupling (SOC) on the Ruderman-Kittel-Kasuya-Yosida interaction between magnetic impurities in two kinds of three-dimensional noncentrosymmetric systems. It has been found that linear SOCs lead to the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction and the Ising interaction, in addition to the conventional Heisenberg interaction. These interactions possess distinct range functions from three dimensional electron gases and Dirac/Weyl semimetals. In the weak SOC limit, the Heisenberg interaction dominates over the other two interactions in a moderately l…
We calculate the linear conductance of a two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG)-based junction between a normal semiconductor section and a hybrid semiconductor-superconductor section, under perpendicular magnetic field. We consider two important terms often neglected in the literature, the magneto-orbital and transverse Rashba spin-orbit. The strong orbital effect due to the magnetic field yields topological phase transitions to nontrivial phases hosting Majorana modes in the hybrid section. The presence of a potential barrier at the junction interface reveals the Majorana phases as quantized pl…
Superfast hole spin qubits enabled by uniaxial strain-boosted spin-orbit coupling
State Key Laboratory of Semiconductor Physics and Chip Technologies, Institute of Semiconductors, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院半导体研究所）；Center of Materials Science and Optoelectronics Engineering, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学材料科学与光电技术中心）
Rashba interfaces have emerged as promising platforms for spin-charge interconversion through the direct and inverse Edelstein effects. Notably, oxide-based two-dimensional electron gases (2DEGs) display a large and gate-tunable conversion efficiency, as determined by transport measurements. However, a direct visualization of the Rashba-split bands in oxide 2DEGs is lacking, which hampers an advanced understanding of their rich spin-orbit physics. Here, we investigate KTaO$_3$-2DEGs and evidence their Rashba-split bands using angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy. Fitting the bands with a …
Topological insulators represent a new class of quantum phase defined by invariant symmetries and spin-orbit coupling that guarantees metallic Dirac excitations at its surface. The discoveries of these states have sparked the hope of realizing nontrivial excitations and novel effects such as a magnetoelectric effect and topological Majorana excitations. Here we develop a theoretical formalism to show that a three dimensional topological insulator can be designed artificially via stacking bilayers of two-dimensional Fermi gases with opposite Rashba-type spin-orbit coupling on adjacent layers, a…
Two-dimensional ferromagnetic electron gases subject to random scalar potentials and Rashba spin-orbit interactions exhibit a striking quantum criticality. As disorder strength $W$ increases, the systems undergo a transition from a normal diffusive metal consisting of extended states to a marginal metal consisting of critical states at a critical disorder $W_{c,1}$. Further increase of $W$, another transition from the marginal metal to an insulator occurs at $W_{c,2}$. Through highly accurate numerical procedures based on the recursive Green's function method and the exact diagonalization, we …
SrTiO$_3$-based two-dimensional electron gases (2DEGs) can be formed through the deposition of epitaxial oxides like LaAlO$_3$ or of reactive metals such as Al. Such 2DEGs possess a finite Rashba spin-orbit coupling that has recently been harnessed to interconvert charge and spin currents through the direct and inverse Edelstein and spin Hall effects. Here we compare the formation and properties of 2DEGs generated in SrTiO$_3$ by the growth of Al, Ta and Y ultrathin films by magnetron sputtering. By combining in situ and ex situ X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) we gain insight into the r…
We report on transport characteristics of field effect two-dimensional electron gases (2DEG) in surface indium antimonide quantum wells. The topmost 5 nm of the 30 nm wide quantum well is doped and shown to promote the formation of reliable, low resistance Ohmic contacts to surface InSb 2DEGs. High quality single-subband magnetotransport with clear quantized integer quantum Hall plateaus are observed to filling factor $ν=1$ in magnetic fields of up to $B=18$ T. We show that the electron density is gate-tunable, reproducible, and stable from pinch-off to 4$\times 10^{11}$ cm$^{-2}$, and peak mo…
We study the spin-charge conversion mechanisms in a two-dimensional gas of electrons moving in a smooth disorder potential by accounting for both Rashba-type and Mott's skew scattering contributions. We find that quantum interference effects between spin-flip and skew scattering give rise to anisotropic spin precession scattering (ASP), a direct spin-charge conversion mechanism that was discovered in an earlier study of graphene decorated with adatoms [C. Huang \emph{et al.} Phys.~Rev.~B \textbf{94} 085414.~(2016)]. Our findings suggest that, together with other spin-charge conversion mechanis…
In a semiconductor, collective excitations of spin textures usually decay rather fast due to D'yakonov-Perel' spin relaxation. The latter arises from spin-orbit coupling, which induces wave-vector-dependent spin rotations that, in conjunction with random disorder scattering, generate spin decoherence. However, symmetries occurring under certain conditions can prevent the relaxation of particular homogeneous and inhomogeneous spin textures. The inhomogeneous spin texture, termed as persistent spin helix, is especially appealing as it enables us to manipulate the spin orientation while retaining…
Semiconducting quantum wires defined within two-dimensional electron gases and strongly coupled to thin superconducting layers have been extensively explored in recent experiments as promising platforms to host Majorana bound states. We study numerically such a geometry, consisting of a quasi-one-dimensional wire coupled to a disordered three-dimensional superconducting layer. We find that, in the strong-coupling limit of a sizable proximity-induced superconducting gap, all transverse subbands of the wire are significantly shifted in energy relative to the chemical potential of the wire. For t…
A persistent spin helix (PSH) is a robust helical spin-density pattern arising in disordered 2D electron gases with Rashba $α$ and Dresselhaus $β$ spin-orbit (SO) tuned couplings, i.e., $α=\pmβ$. Here we investigate the emergence of a Persistent Skyrmion Lattice (PSL) resulting from the coherent superposition of PSHs along orthogonal directions -- crossed PSHs -- in wells with two occupied subbands $ν=1,2$. For realistic GaAs wells we show that the Rashba $α_ν$ and Dresselhaus $β_ν$ couplings can be simultaneously tuned to equal strengths but opposite signs, e.g., $α_1= β_1$ and $α_2=-β_2$. In…
We demonstrate the existence of topological insulators in one dimension protected by mirror and time-reversal symmetries. They are characterized by a nontrivial $\mathbb{Z}_2$ topological invariant defined in terms of the "partial" polarizations, which we show to be quantized in presence of a 1D mirror point. The topological invariant determines the generic presence or absence of integer boundary charges at the mirror-symmetric boundaries of the system. We check our findings against spin-orbit coupled Aubry-André-Harper models that can be realized, e.g. in cold-atomic Fermi gases loaded in one…
We investigated the spin coherence of high-mobility two-dimensional electron gases confined in multilayer GaAs quantum wells. The dynamics of the spin polarization was optically studied using pump-probe techniques: time-resolved Kerr rotation and resonant spin amplification. For double and triple quantum wells doped beyond the metal-to-insulator transition, the spin-orbit interaction was tailored by the sample parameters of structural symmetry (Rashba constant), width and electron density (Dresselhaus linear and cubic constants) which allows us to attain long dephasing times in the nanoseconds…
