Based on the Noether's theorem, we develop systematically and rigorously the spin-dependent formulation of the conservation laws. The effect of the electronic polarization due to the spin-orbit coupling is included in the Maxwell equations. The polarization is related to the antisymmetric components of spin current, and it provides a possibility to measure the spin current directly. The varianc...

We study the effects of a gate-controlled Rashba spin-orbit coupling to quantum spin Hall edge states in HgTe quantum wells. A uniform Rashba coupling can be employed in tuning the spin orientation of the edge states while preserving the time-reversal symmetry. We introduce a sample geometry where the Rashba coupling can be used in probing helicity by purely electrical means without requiring s...

– A system exhibiting multiple simultaneously broken symmetries offers the opportunity to influence physical phenomena such as tunneling currents by means of external control parameters. Time-reversal symmetry and inversion symmetry are both absent in ferromag-netic metals with substantial spin-orbit coupling. We here study transport of spin in a system consisting of two ferromagnets with spin-...

Spin accumulation is a crucial but imprecise concept in spintronics. In metal-based spintronics it is characterized in terms of semiclassical distribution functions. In semiconductors with a strong spin-orbit coupling the spin accumulation is interpreted as a superposition of coherent eigenstates. Both views can be reconciled by taking into account the electron-electron interaction: a sufficien...

We study the effect of impurities in inducing spin-orbit coupling in graphene. We show that the sp3 distortion induced by an impurity can lead to a large increase in the spin-orbit coupling with a value comparable to the one found in diamond and other zinc-blende semiconductors. The spin-flip scattering produced by the impurity leads to spin scattering lengths of the order found in recent exper...

We study the electronic band structure of monolayer graphene when Rashba spin-orbit coupling is present. We show that if the Rashba spin-orbit coupling is stronger than the intrinsic spin-orbit coupling, the low-energy bands undergo trigonal-warping deformation and that for energies smaller than the Lifshitz energy, the Fermi circle breaks up into separate parts. The effect is very similar to w...