Nonvanishing spin Hall currents in disordered spin-orbit coupling systems

Abstract

Spin-orbit coupling-induced spin Hall currents are generic in metals and doped semiconductors. It has recently been argued that the spin Hall conductivity can be dominated by an intrinsic contribution that follows from Bloch state distortion in the presence of an electric field. Here we report on numerical demonstration of the robustness of this effect in the presence of disorder scattering for the case of a two-dimensional electron gas with Rashba spin-orbit interactions.