Spin Hall effects in diffusive normal metals

R. V. Shchelushkin, Arne Brataas

Published 2004-09-06Version 1

We consider spin and charge flow in normal metals. We employ the Keldysh formalism to find transport equations in the presence of spin-orbit interaction, interaction with magnetic impurities, and non-magnetic impurity scattering. Using the quasiclassical approximation, we derive diffusion equations which include contributions from skew scattering, side-jump scattering and the anomalous spin-orbit induced velocity. We compute the magnitude of various spin Hall effects in experimental relevant geometries and discuss when the different scattering mechanisms are important.