American Physical Society, Physical review B, 12(90), 2014
DOI: 10.1103/physrevb.90.125309
Full text: Unavailable
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.