Signatures of Rashba Spin-Orbit Interaction in Charge and Spin Properties of Quantum Hall Systems

Daniel Hernangomez-Perez, Serge Florens, Thierry Champel

Published 2014-02-05, updated 2014-04-28Version 2

We study the local equilibrium properties of two-dimensional electron gases at high magnetic fields in the presence of random smooth electrostatic disorder, Rashba spin-orbit coupling, and the Zeeman interaction. Using a systematic magnetic length ($l_B$) expansion within a Green's function framework we derive quantum functionals for the local spin-resolved particle and current densities which can be useful for future studies combining disorder and mean-field electron-electron interaction in the quantum Hall regime. We point out that the spin polarization presents a peculiar spatial dependence which can be used to determine the strength of the Rashba coupling by local probes. The spatial structure of the current density, consisting of both compressible and incompressible contributions, also essentially reflects the effects of Rashba spin-orbit interaction on the energy spectrum. We show that in the semiclassical limit $l_B \rightarrow 0$ the local Hall conductivity remains, however, still quantized in units of $e^2/h$ for any finite strength of the spin-orbit interaction. In contrast, it becomes half-integer quantized when the latter is infinite, a situation which corresponds to a disordered topological insulator surface consisting of a single Dirac cone. Finally, we argue how to define at high magnetic fields a spin Hall conductivity related to a dissipationless angular momentum flow, which is characterized by a sequence of plateaus as a function of the inverse magnetic field (thus free of resonances).