Quantum coherence and its dephasing in the giant spin Hall effect and nonlocal voltage generated by magnetotransport through multiterminal graphene bars

Abstract

Motivated by the recent experimental observation [D. A. Abanin et al., Science 323, 328 (2011)] of nonlocality in magnetotransport near the Dirac point in six-terminal graphene Hall bars, for a wide range of temperatures and magnetic fields, we develop a nonequilibrium Green function (NEGF) theory of this phenomenon. In the phase-coherent regime and strong magnetic field, we find large spin Hall (SH) conductance in four-terminal bridges, where the SH current is pure only at the Dirac point (DP), as well as the nonlocal voltage at a remote location in six-terminal bars where the direct and inverse SH effect operate at the same time. The "momentum-relaxing" dephasing reduces their values at the DP by two orders of magnitude while concurrently washing out any features away from the DP. Our theory is based on the Meir-Wingreen formula with dephasing introduced via phenomenological many-body self-energies, which is then linearized for multiterminal geometries to extract currents and voltages.