Giant Collective Spin-Orbit Field in a Quantum Well: Fine Structure of Spin Plasmons

F. BABOUX; F. PEREZ; C. A. ULLRICH; I. D'AMICO; J. GÓMEZ; M. BERNARD

PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS

AMER PHYSICAL SOC

Lugar: New York; Año: 2012 vol. 109 p. 166401 - 166406

0031-9007

We employ inelastic light scattering with magnetic fields to study intersubband spin plasmons in a quantum well. We demonstrate the existence of a giant collective spin-orbit (SO) field that splits the spin-plasmon spectrum into a triplet. The effect is remarkable as each individual electron would be expected to precess in its own momentum-dependent SO field, leading to Dyakonov-Perel dephasing. Instead, many-body effects lead to a striking organization of the SO fields at the collective level. The macroscopic spin moment is quantized by a uniform collective SO field, five times higher than the individual SO field. We provide a momentum-space cartography of this field.