Non-vanishing spin Hall currents in disordered spin-orbit coupling systems

Abstract

Spin currents that flow perpendicular to the electric field direction are generic in metals and doped semiconductors with spin-orbit coupling. It has recently been argued that the spin Hall conductivity can be dominated by an intrinsic contribution which follows from Bloch state distortion in the presence of an electric field. Here we report on an numerical demonstration of the robustness of this effect in the presence of disorder scattering for the case of a two-dimensional electron-gas with Rashba spin-orbit interactions (R2DES).