Orbital magnetization in semiconductors

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.