Enhancement of Spin Current Polarization in 2D Ferromagnetic/Insulator/Heavy Fermion Material Tunnel Junction Induced by Rashba Spin-Orbit Coupling

Abstract

A theoretical investigation of the spin- and charge transport properties of the ferromagnetic metal/insulator/heavy fermion Rashba metal tunnel junction is presented. The electron dynamics in the entire system are described within a single-particle effective Hamiltonian. The dependence of the spin current polarization and the low-bias spin-resolved conductance spectra on the macroscopic parameters of the system are studied. We consider an infinite two-dimensional system with periodic boundary conditions imposed along the transverse direction of the junction. We observed that strong spin current polarization amplification and spin current filtering are induced by Rashba spin–orbit coupling in the presence of a large effective masses difference between ferromagnetic metal and heavy fermion Rashba material. The spin-dependent scattering problem is solved analytically within the effective mass approximation in combination with the spin density matrix formalism.