Fang Cheng(方诚)a)b)c), Wang Zhi-Gang(王志刚)c), Li Shu-Shen(李树深)a), and Zhang Ping(张平)c)d)†
a Laboratory for Superlattices and Microstructures, Institute of Semiconductors, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100083, China; b Physics Department, East China Institute of Technology, Fuzhou 344000, Jiangxi Province, China; c Institute of Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics, Beijing 100088, China; d Center for Applied Physics and Technology, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
Abstract This paper theoretically investigates the orbital magnetization of electron-doped (n-type) semiconductor heterostructures and of hole-doped (p-type) bulk semiconductors, which are respectively described by a two-dimensional electron/hole Hamiltonian with both the included Rashba spin--orbit coupling and Zeeman splitting terms. It is the Zeeman splitting, rather than the Rashba spin--orbit coupling, that destroys the time-reversal symmetry of the semiconductor systems and results in nontrivial orbital magnetization. The results show that the magnitude of the orbital magnetization per hole and the Hall conductance in the p-type bulk semiconductors are about 10-2--10-1 effective Bohr magneton and 10-1--1 e2/h, respectively. However, the orbital magnetization per electron and the Hall conductance in the n-type semiconductor heterostructures are too small to be easily observed in experiment.
Received: 12 March 2009
Revised: 07 April 2009
Accepted manuscript online:
PACS:
75.60.Ej
(Magnetization curves, hysteresis, Barkhausen and related effects)
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