Transport properties of Rashba conducting strips coupled to magnetic moments with spiral order

Abstract

Magnetic and transport properties of a conducting layer with Rashba spin-orbit coupling (RSOC) magnetically coupled to a layer of localized magnetic moments are studied on strips of varying width. The localized moments are free to rotate and they acquire an order that results from the competition between the magnetic exchange energy and the kinetic energy of the conduction electrons. By minimizing the total Hamiltonian within the manifold of variational spiral orders of the magnetic moments, the phase diagram in the space of the interlayer exchange J sd , and the ratio of the Rashba coupling to the hopping integral, λ/t was determined. Two main phases with longitudinal spiral order were found, one at large interlayer coupling J sd with uniform order in the transversal direction, and the other at small J sd showing a transversal staggered order. This staggered spiral order is unstable against an antiferromagnetic (AFM) for large values of λ/t. In both spiral phases, the longitudinal spiral momentum that departs from the expected linear dependence with the RSOC for large values of λ/t. Then, various transport properties, including the longitudinal Drude weight and the spin Hall conductivity, inside these two phases are computed in linear response, and their behavior is compared with the ones for the more well-studied cases of a fixed ferromagnetic (FM) and AFM localized magnetic orders.