Nonlinear Rashba effect in a strongly correlated system

Abstract

Abstract There have been a number of reports of experimental observations of a field-dependent enhancement of the Rashba spin-orbit splitting in surface states. We show that strong Coulomb correlations lead to an enhancement of the spin-orbit coupling which is highly sensitive to band-bending and applied electric potentials. In a system with broken inversion symmetry, this leads to a nonlinear field-dependent Rashba interaction that could be responsible for the experimental observations.