Eur. Phys. J. B (2015) 88: 35
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2014-50557-6

Regular Article

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

¹ State Key Laboratory of Theoretical Physics, Institute of Theoretical Physics and University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, P.R. China
² Synergetic Innovation Center of Quantum Information and Quantum Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui 230026, P.R. China
³ Beijing Computational Science Research Center, Beijing 100084, P.R. China

^a e-mail: lipingyang@csrc.ac.cn

Received: 18 August 2014
Received in final form: 25 September 2014
Published online: 2 February 2015

Abstract

Spin-orbit coupling (SOC) can mediate the electric-dipole spin resonance (EDSR) within an a.c. electric field. By applying a quantum linear coordinate transformation, we find that the essence of EDSR could be understood as a spin precession under an effective a.c. magnetic field induced by the SOC in the reference frame, which is following exactly the classical trajectory of this spin. Based on this observation, we find an upper limit for the spin-flipping speed in the EDSR-based control of spin. For two-dimensional case, the azimuthal dependence of the effective magnetic field can be used to measure the ratio of the Rashba and Dresselhaus SOC strengths.