1205.2006 (Sergey V. Eremeev et al.)

Ideal two-dimensional electron systems with a giant Rashba-type spin
splitting in real materials: surfaces of bismuth tellurohalides    [PDF]

Sergey V. Eremeev, Ilya A. Nechaev, Yury M. Koroteev, Pedro M. Echenique, Evgueni V. Chulkov

Spintronics is aimed at active 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 (SOI) in a two-dimensional (2D) electron system immersed in an inversion-asymmetric environment. The SOI induced spin-splitting of the 2D-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 2D electron systems which reside at tellurium-terminated surfaces of bismuth tellurohalides. Among these semiconductors, BiTeCl stands out for its isotropic metallic surface-state band with the Gamma-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.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.2006