Enhancing von Neumann entropy by chaos in spin-orbit entanglement

For a quantum system with multiple degrees of freedom or subspaces, loss of coherence in a certain subspace is intimately related to the enhancement of entanglement between this subspace and another one. We investigate intra-particle entanglement in two-dimensional mesoscopic systems, where an electron has both spin and orbital degrees of freedom and the interaction between them is enabled by Rashba type of spin-orbit coupling. The geometric shape of the scattering region can be adjusted to produce a continuous spectrum of classical dynamics with different degree of chaos. Focusing on the spin degree of freedom in the weak spin-orbit coupling regime, we find that classical chaos can significantly enhance spin-orbit entanglement at the expense of spin coherence. Our finding that classical chaos can be beneficial to intra-particle entanglement may have potential applications such as enhancing the bandwidth of quantum communications.