We develop a general scheme of deriving boundary conditions for spin-charge coupled transport in disordered systems with spin-orbit interactions. To illustrate the application of the method, we explicitly derive boundary conditions for spin diffusion in the Rashba model. Due to the surface spin precession, the boundary conditions are nontrivial and contain terms, which couple different components of the spin density. We argue that boundary conditions and the corresponding electric-field-induced spin accumulation generally depend on the nature of the boundary and therefore the spin Hall effect in a spin-orbit coupled system can be viewed as a nonuniversal edge phenomenon.

• Received 30 January 2006

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.74.115331