Spin Coulomb Drag

Abstract

We introduce a distinctive feature of spin-polarized transport, the Spin Coulomb Drag: there is an intrinsic source of friction for spin currents due to the Coulomb interaction between spin ``up'' and spin ``down'' electrons. We calculate the associated ``spin transrestistivity'' in a generalized random phase approximation and discuss its dependence on temperature, frequency, and electron density. We show that, in an appropriate range of parameters, such resistivity is measurable and propose an experiment to measure it.