Spin Hall Effect in Ferroelectric Rashba Semiconductors

The coupling of different functionalities in materials has been playing an increasingly significant role in the design and discovery of devices with novel properties. In this work, we study the Spin Hall Effect (SHE) in Ferro-Electric Rashba Semi-Conductors(FERSC) in order to explore the possibility of controlling spin transport via an electric field. This study is motivated by the discovery of the spin-electric coupling effect in FERSC (eg. GeTe) which allows the switch and control of the spin texture via an electric field, and the fact that band splitting together with electric filed could eventually lead to a universal spin hall conductivity. A detailed theoretical investigation of systems such as GeTe, SnTe, and some hexagonal ABC semiconductors (eg. LiBeSb, NaZnSb) will be presented. These results are obtained using the recently developed PAOFLOW package (http://www.aflowlib.org/src/paoflow/) integrated in AFLOWπ high-throughput framework (http://www.aflowlib.org/src/aflowpi/).