Indirect control of spin precession by electric field via spin-orbit coupling

Li-Ping Yang, C. P. Sun

Published 2013-12-30, updated 2014-08-18Version 3

The spin-orbit coupling (SOC) can mediate electric-dipole spin resonance (EDSR) in an a.c. electric field. In this letter, the EDSR is essentially understood as an spin precession under an effective a.c. magnetic field induced by the SOC in the reference frame, which is exactly following the classical trajectory of the electron and obtained by applying a quantum linear coordinate transformation. With this observation for one-dimensional (1D) case, we find a upper limit for the spin-flipping speed in the EDSR-based control of spin, which is given by the accessible data from the current experiment. For two-dimensional case, the azimuthal dependence of the effective magnetic field can be used to measure the ratio of the Rashba and Dresselhause SOC strengths.