Thermoelectric effects in graphene with local spin-orbit interaction

We investigate the transport properties of a graphene layer in the presence of Rashba spin-orbit interaction. Quite generally, spin-orbit interactions induce spin splittings and modifications of the graphene bandstructure. We calculate within the scattering approach the linear electric and thermoelectric responses of a clean sample when the Rashba coupling is localized around a finite region. We find that the thermoelectric conductance, unlike its electric counterpart, is quite sensitive to external modulations of the Fermi energy. Therefore, our results suggest that thermocurrent measurements may serve as a useful tool to detect nonhomogeneous spin-orbit interactions present in a graphene-based device. Furthermore, we find that the junction thermopower is largely dominated by an intrinsic term independently of the spin-orbit potential scattering. We discuss the possibility of cancelling the intrinsic thermopower by resolving the Seebeck coefficient in the subband space. This causes unbalanced populations of electronic modes which can be tuned with external gate voltages or applied temperature biases.