We study the helical edge states of a two-dimensional topological insulator without axial spin symmetry due to the Rashba spin-orbit interaction. Lack of axial spin symmetry can lead to so-called generic helical edge states, which have energy-dependent spin orientation. This opens the possibility of inelastic backscattering and thereby nonquantized transport. Here we find analytically the new d...

Abstract. We consider a two-dimensional electron gas with Rashba’s spin-orbit interaction and two in-plane potentials superimposed along directions perpendicular to each other. The first of these potentials is assumed to be a general periodic potential while the second one is totally arbitrary. A general form for Bloch’s amplitude is found and an eigen-value problem for the band structure of th...

We study the intravalley spin-orbit-mediated spin relaxation in monolayers of MoS2 within a two bands effective Hamiltonian. The intrinsic spin splitting of the valence band as well as a Rashba-like coupling due to the breaking of the out-of-plane inversion symmetry are considered. We show that, in the hole doped regime, the out-of-plane spin relaxation is not very efficient since the spin spli...

We performed magnetotransport measurements on ultathin Pb films deposited onto cleaved GaAs surface and observed two-dimensional superconductivity for an amorphous 2.2-Å-thick film, which is below one monolayer. The superconducting transition is almost independent of parallel magnetic field as high as 14 T. This means that the superconducting state has much larger critical magnetic field than P...

We derive an effective Hamiltonian for a (001)-confined quasi-two-dimensional hole gas in a strained zincblende semiconductor heterostructure including both Rashba and Dresselhaus spin-orbit coupling. In the presence of uniaxial strain along the 〈110〉 axes, we find a conserved spin quantity in the vicinity of the Fermi contours in the lowest valence subband. In contrast to previous works, this ...

We study high-field spin transport of electrons in a quasi one-dimensional channel of a GaAs gate controlled spin interferometer (SPINFET) using a semiclassical formalism (spin density matrix evolution coupled with Boltzmann transport equation). Spin dephasing (or depolarization) is predominantly caused by D’yakonov-Perel’ relaxation associated with momentum dependent spin orbit coupling effect...

The paper sums up a theoretical and experimental investigation of the influence of the spin–orbit coupling in W(110) on the spin structure of electronic states in deposited Au and Cu monolayers. Angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy reveals that in the case of monolayers of Au and Cu spin–orbit split bands are formed in a surface-projected gap of W(110). Spin resolution shows that these sta...

We investigate the existence of the pure spin ratchet effect in a dissipative quasi-one-dimensional system with Rashba spin-orbit interaction. The system is additionally placed into a transverse uniform stationary in-plane magnetic field. It is shown that the effect exists at low temperatures and pure spin currents can be generated by applying an unbiased ac driving to the system. An analytical...

We report experiments on epitaxially grown Fe/GaAs/Au tunnel junctions demonstrating that the tunneling anisotropic magnetoresistance (TAMR) effect can be controlled by a magnetic field. Theoretical modelling shows that the interplay of the orbital effects of a magnetic field and the Dresselhaus spin-orbit coupling in the GaAs barrier leads to an independent contribution to the TAMR effect with...

A microscopic expression of the residual electrical resistivity tensor is derived in linear response theory for Rashba electrons scattering at a magnetic impurity with cylindrical or noncylindrical potential. The behavior of the longitudinal and transversal residual resistivity is obtained analytically and computed for an Fe impurity at the Au(111) surface. We studied the evolution of the resis...