Condensed Matter and Biological Physics Seminars

I survey the theory of the spin Hall effect in doped semiconductors, including spin-orbit, electron-electron interactions, and electron-impurity scattering. In the absence of spin precession (e.g. in GaAs (110) quantum wells) the d.c. spin Hall conductivity is dominated, in the clean limit, by “skew-scattering” with impurities. In the next-to-leading order the so-called “side-jump” contribution makes its appearance. I show that Coulomb scattering processes can greatly reduce the skew-scattering contribution to the spin Hall conductivity, but do not affect the side-jump. Finally, I discuss how the above contributions are modified by spin precession and how a universal spin Hall conductivity may appear in the a.c. regime.