Electron spin filtering in all-semiconductor tunneling structures

Abstract

In this work we briefly review the present day perspectives for exploiting conventional nonmagnetic semiconductor nano-technology to design high speed spin-filter devices. In recent theoretical investigations a high spin polarization has been predicted for the ballistic tunneling current in semiconductor single- and double-barrier asymmetric tunnel structures of III-V semiconductors with strong Rashba spin-orbit coupling. We show in this paper that the polarization in the tunneling can probability be sufficiently increased for producing realistic single-barrier structures by including of the Dresselhaus term into consideration. (C) 2004 Published by Elsevier Ltd.