Temperature dependence of the intrinsic spin Hall effect in Rashba spin-orbit coupled systems

¹  School of Physics, Peking University - Beijing 100871, China
²  School of Engineering Physics, University of Wollongong - New South Wales 2552, Australia

Corresponding author: czhang@uow.edu.au

Received: 26 February 2008
Accepted: 29 April 2008

Abstract

We investigate the temperature dependence of the intrinsic charge and spin transport in two-dimensional semiconductors with Rashba spin-orbit coupling. For 2α k_F⁰-2mα²/² < ω < 2α k_F⁰+2mα²/² (where α is the Rashba spin-orbit coupling parameter), the real part of the optical conductivity (σ^R(ω)) and the imaginary part of the spin Hall conductivity (σ^I_sH(ω)) decrease with temperature monotonically. Outside this frequency range, σ^R(ω) and σ^I_sH(ω) exhibit resonant behavior. At high frequencies, σ^R_sH(ω) changes sign at a characteristic temperature T₁. Our result suggests that the sign and magnitude of σ^R_sH(ω) can be tuned by changing the temperature.