Many hadron production reactions give rise to significant ⊥ single-spin asymmetries (SSA) which persist at high energies. For example, hyperons produced in hadronic collisions typically show a large polarization perpendicular to the production plane. More recently, the HERMES collaboration found a significant SSA (left-right asymmetry in the transverse momentum distribution of the produced meso...

At the LHC, top quark pairs are dominantly produced from gluons, making it difficult to measure the top quark forward-backward asymmetry. To improve the asymmetry measurement, we study variables that can distinguish between top quarks produced from quarks and those from gluons: the invariant mass of the top pair, the rapidity of the top-antitop system in the lab frame, the rapidity of the top q...

Spin-momentum helical locking is one of the most important properties of the nontrivial topological surface states (TSS) in 3D topological insulators (TIs). It underlies the iconic topological protection (suppressing elastic backscattering) of TSS and is foundational to many exotic physics (e.g., majorana fermions) and device applications (e.g., spintronics) predicted for TIs. Based on this spi...

It is shown that a homogeneous non-equlibrium spin-polarization in semiconductor heterostructures results in an electric current. The microscopic origin of the effect is an inherent asymmetry of spin-flip scattering in systems with lifted spin degeneracy caused by k-linear terms in the Hamiltonian.

Structural inversion asymmetry controls the magnitude of Rashba spin-orbit coupling in the electron energy spectrum of a narrow band gap semiconductor. We investigate this effect for a series of two-dimensional electron gases in In0.52Ga0.48As quantum wells, surrounded by In0.52Al0.48As barriers, where either one or two electric subbands are populated. Structural inversion asymmetry does not ex...

We study the effect of spin-orbit coupling on quantum gates produced by pulsing the exchange interaction between two single electron quantum dots. Spin-orbit coupling enters as a small spin precession when electrons tunnel between dots. For adiabatic pulses the resulting gate is described by a unitary operator acting on the four-dimensional Hilbert space of two qubits. If the precession axis is...

Wedemonstrate opto-spintronics using Fe-doped IndiumPhosphide (InP). Themethod is based on optical orientation of InP conduction electron spinswhich are electrically detected in planar InP/ oxide/Ni tunnel spinfilters.We separate the optical excitation from electrical detection, avoiding thus additional interactions of photonswith the ferromagnet. Interface engineering provides a surface iron a...

The STAR Collaboration is pursuing measurements to help understand the origin of the proton spin. The gluon polarization is accesible via measurements of the longitudinal double-spin asymmetry, ALL , for inclusive charged and neutral pions and inclusive jet production. A recent global analysis of polarized DIS data and RHIC spin data disfavors extreme gluon polarization scenarios. The measureme...

We study a possible origin of single spin asymmetries in the large pT inclusive production of hadrons in the scattering of unpolarized protons or leptons on transversely polarized nucleons. Such asymmetry is related to the single-spin asymmetry for the process p↑ → q + X or, equivalently, to the off-diagonal matrix element of the quark density operator ψ̄γψ; this quantity need not be zero if tra...

We report results of calculations of the effect of spin-orbit interaction on electron spin relaxation in a lateral quantum dot. Our study is motivated by puzzling results of high source-drain transport measurements of singlet-triplet transitions of two electrons in lateral and vertical devices that show a strong asymmetry as a function of the applied magnetic field. Using exact diagonalization ...