Transport properties of Rashba conducting strips coupled to magnetic moments with spiral order

José A. Riera
Phys. Rev. B 97, 035136 – Published 16 January 2018

Abstract

The magnetic and transport properties of a conducting layer with Rashba spin-orbit coupling (RSOC) magnetically coupled to a layer of localized magnetic moments are studied on strips of varying width. The localized moments are free to rotate and they acquire an order that results from the competition between the magnetic exchange energy and the kinetic energy of the conduction electrons. By minimizing the total Hamiltonian within the manifold of variational spiral orders of the magnetic moments, the phase diagram in the space of the interlayer exchange Jsd and the ratio of the Rashba coupling to the hopping integral λ/t was determined. Two main phases with longitudinal spiral order were found, one at large interlayer coupling Jsd with uniform order in the transversal direction, and the other at small Jsd showing a transversal staggered order. This staggered spiral order is unstable against an antiferromagnetic (AFM) one for large values of λ/t. In both spiral phases, the longitudinal spiral momentum departs from the expected linear dependence with the RSOC for large values of λ/t. Then, various transport properties, including the longitudinal Drude weight and the spin Hall conductivity, inside these two phases are computed in linear response, and their behavior is compared with the ones for the more well-studied cases of a fixed ferromagnetic (FM) and AFM localized magnetic orders.

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  • Received 17 November 2017

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.97.035136

©2018 American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Condensed Matter, Materials & Applied Physics

Authors & Affiliations

José A. Riera

  • Instituto de Física Rosario (CONICET) and Universidad Nacional de Rosario, 2000-Rosario, Argentina

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Issue

Vol. 97, Iss. 3 — 15 January 2018

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