Abstract
We study the possibility for the extraction of the Rashba spin-orbit coupling constant for a two-dimensional electron gas with the conductance microscopy technique. Due to the interplay between the effective magnetic field due to the Rashba spin-orbit coupling and the external magnetic field applied within the plane of confinement, the electron backscattering induced by a charged tip of an atomic force microscope located above the sample leads to the spin precession and spin mixing of the incident and reflected electron waves between the QPC and the tip-induced 2DEG depletion region. This mixing leads to a characteristic angle-dependent beating pattern visible in the conductance maps. We show that the structure of the Fermi level, bearing signatures of the spin-orbit coupling, can be extracted from the Fourier transform of the interference fringes in the conductance maps as a function of the magnetic field direction. We propose a simple analytical model which can be used to fit the experimental data in order to obtain the spin-orbit coupling constant.
Highlights
We study the possibility for the extraction of the Rashba spin-orbit coupling constant for a twodimensional electron gas with the conductance microscopy technique
In this paper we propose a way to extract the structure of the dispersion relation near the Fermi level[1] using spin-dependent scattering and the resulting interference with the scanning gate microscopy[31,32] (SGM) applied to systems with QPCs33,34
Note that the total field is drastically changed when the electron leaves the lateral confinement of the quantum point contacts (QPCs) due to the increase of the wave vector
Summary
Due to the interplay between the effective magnetic field due to the Rashba spin-orbit coupling and the external magnetic field applied within the plane of confinement, the electron backscattering induced by a charged tip of an atomic force microscope located above the sample leads to the spin precession and spin mixing of the incident and reflected electron waves between the QPC and the tip-induced 2DEG depletion region. We show that the structure of the Fermi level, bearing signatures of the spin-orbit coupling, can be extracted from the Fourier transform of the interference fringes in the conductance maps as a function of the magnetic field direction.
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