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American Physical Society, Physical review B, 12(90), 2014

DOI: 10.1103/physrevb.90.125309

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Weak localization, spin relaxation, and spin diffusion: Crossover between weak and strong Rashba coupling limits

Journal article published in 2014 by Yasufumi Araki, Guru Khalsa ORCID, Allan H. MacDonald
This paper was not found in any repository, but could be made available legally by the author.
This paper was not found in any repository, but could be made available legally by the author.

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Abstract

Disorder scattering and spin-orbit coupling are together responsible for the diffusion and relaxation of spin-density in time-reversal invariant systems. We study spin-relaxation and diffusion in a two-dimensional electron gas with Rashba spin-orbit coupling and spin-independent disorder, focusing on the role of Rashba spin-orbit coupling in transport. Spin-orbit coupling contributes to spin relaxation, transforming the quantum interference contribution to conductivity from a negative weak localization (WL) correction to a positive weak anti-localization (WAL) correction. The importance of spin channel mixing in transport is largest in the regime where the Bloch state energy uncertainty and the Rashba spin-orbit splitting ∆SO are comparable. We find that as a consequence of this spin channel mixing, the WL-WAL crossover is non-monotonic in this intermediate regime, and use our results to address recent experimental studies of transport at two-dimensional oxide interfaces.