Ideal two-dimensional electron systems with a giant Rashba-type spin splitting in real materials: Surfaces of bismuth tellurohalides
Spintronics is aimed at actively controlling and manipulating the spin degrees of freedom in semiconductor devices. A promising way to achieve this goal is to make use of the tunable Rashba effect that relies on the spin-orbit interaction in a two-dimensional electron system immersed in an inversion...
| Autores: | , , , , |
|---|---|
| Tipo de recurso: | artículo |
| Estado: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2012 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) |
| Repositorio: | DIGITAL.CSIC. Repositorio Institucional del CSIC |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:digital.csic.es:10261/102076 |
| Acceso en línea: | http://hdl.handle.net/10261/102076 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Sumario: | Spintronics is aimed at actively controlling and manipulating the spin degrees of freedom in semiconductor devices. A promising way to achieve this goal is to make use of the tunable Rashba effect that relies on the spin-orbit interaction in a two-dimensional electron system immersed in an inversion-asymmetric environment. The spin-orbit-induced spin splitting of the two-dimensional electron state provides a basis for many theoretically proposed spintronic devices. However, the lack of semiconductors with large Rashba effect hinders realization of these devices in actual practice. Here we report on a giant Rashba-type spin splitting in two-dimensional electron systems that reside at tellurium-terminated surfaces of bismuth tellurohalides. Among these semiconductors, BiTeCl stands out for its isotropic metallic surface-state band with the Γ̄-point energy lying deep inside the bulk band gap. The giant spin splitting of this band ensures a substantial spin asymmetry of the inelastic mean free path of quasiparticles with different spin orientations. © 2012 American Physical Society. |
|---|