Spin-Hall Conductivity in Electron-Phonon Coupled Systems

Abstract

We derive the ac spin-Hall conductivity $\sigma_{\rm sH}(\omega)$ of two-dimensional spin-orbit coupled systems interacting with dispersionless phonons of frequency $\omega_0$. For the linear Rashba model we show that the electron-phonon contribution to the spin-vertex corrections breaks the universality of $\sigma_{\rm sH}(\omega)$ at low-frequencies and provides a non-trivial renormalization of the interband resonance. On the contrary, in a generalized Rashba model for which the spin-vertex contributions are absent, the coupling to the phonons enters only through the self-energy, leaving the low frequency behavior of $\sigma_{\rm sH}(\omega)$ unaffected by the electron-phonon interaction.