English

Spin Transport and Accumulation in 2D Weyl Fermion System

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2018-08-15 v3

Abstract

In this work, we study the spin Hall effect and Rashba-Edelstein effect of a 2D Weyl fermion system in the clean limit using the Kubo formalism. Spin transport is solely due to the spin-torque current in this strongly spin-orbit coupled (SOC) system, and chiral spin-flip scattering off non-SOC scalar impurities, with potential strength VV and size aa, gives rise to a skew-scattering mechanism for the spin Hall effect. The key result is that the resultant spin-Hall angle has a fixed sign, with θSHO(V2vF2/a2(kFa)4)\theta^{SH} \sim O \left(\tfrac{V^2}{v_F^2/a^2} (k_F a)^4 \right) being a strongly-dependent function of kFak_F a, with kFk_F and vFv_F being the Fermi wave-vector and Fermi velocity respectively. This, therefore, allows for the possibility of tuning the SHE by adjusting the Fermi energy or impurity size.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1701.00074,
  title  = {Spin Transport and Accumulation in 2D Weyl Fermion System},
  author = {T. Tzen Ong and Naoto Nagaosa},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1701.00074},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

Revised version with inclusion of supplementary information