Spin Current and Accumulation Generated by the Spin Hall Insulator

Masaru Onoda and Naoto Nagaosa

Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 106601 – Published 1 September 2005

Abstract

Spin current and accumulation generated by the electric field in a spin Hall insulator (SHI) are investigated theoretically in terms of the Keldysh formalism. In contrast to the quantum Hall system, there are no massless edge modes in general. The spin current is generated near the contacts to the electrodes by the hybridization between the metallic states and the conduction/valence bands of the SHI, but is truncated by the sink and source of the spin. However, one can produce the spin current flowing out to the conductors, which is attached to the SHI, and also the spin accumulation there, due to the leakage charge current which breaks the time-reversal symmetry.

Received 16 April 2005

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.95.106601

Authors & Affiliations

Masaru Onoda^1,3,* and Naoto Nagaosa^1,2,3,†

¹Correlated Electron Research Center (CERC), National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Tsukuba Central 4, Tsukuba 305-8562, Japan
²Department of Applied Physics, University of Tokyo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-8656, Japan
³CREST, Japan Science and Technology Corporation (JST), Saitama, 332-0012, Japan

^*Electronic address: m.onoda@aist.go.jp
^†Electronic address: nagaosa@appi.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp

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Vol. 95, Iss. 10 — 2 September 2005

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