Mesoscopic Spin Hall Effect

Abstract

We investigate the spin Hall effect in ballistic chaotic quantum dots with spin-orbit coupling. We show that a longitudinal charge current can generate a pure transverse spin current. While this transverse spin current is generically nonzero for a fixed sample, we show that when the spin-orbit coupling time is large compared to the mean dwell time inside the dot, it fluctuates universally from sample to sample or upon variation of the chemical potential with a vanishing average. For a fixed sample configuration, the transverse spin current has a finite typical value ~e^2 V/h, proportional to the longitudinal bias V on the sample, and corresponding to about one excess open channel for one of the two spin species. Our analytical results are in agreement with numerical results in a diffusive system [W. Ren et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 97, 066603 (2006)] and are further confirmed by numerical simulation in a chaotic cavity.