ELECTRON TRANSPORT THROUGH A MESOSCOPIC DEVICE WITH THE SPIN-ORBIT COUPLING SEMICONDUCTOR LEADS

The electronic transport through a mesoscopic confining region coupled to two spin-orbit coupling semiconductor leads is studied. We mainly focus on how the transport behaviors are affected by the Rashba spin-orbit interaction (SOI), which has been neglected in the previous theoretical papers but indeed exists in the semiconductor leads from the recent experimental results. By using Landauer–Büttiker formula and the non-equilibrium Green's function method, the linear conductance of this device is obtained. The numerical results exhibit that the conductance are similar for the two cases of the absence and the presence of the SOI. It means that the SOI in the leads does not qualitatively affects the transport behaviors. However, in detail, the peaks of the conductance are widened and enhanced by the SOI. In some specific cases, the widening and the enhancement could be very strong.