Strong influence of spin-orbit coupling on magnetotransport in two-dimensional hole systems

With a view to electrical spin manipulation and quantum computing applications, recent significant attention has been devoted to semiconductor hole systems, which have very strong spin-orbit interactions. However, experimentally measuring, identifying, and quantifying spin-orbit coupling effects in transport, such as electrically-induced spin polarizations and spin-Hall currents, are challenging. Here we show that the magnetotransport properties of two dimensional (2D) hole systems display strong signatures of the spin-orbit interaction. Specifically, the low-magnetic field Hall coefficient and longitudinal conductivity contain a contribution that is second order in the spin-orbit interaction coefficient and is non-linear in the carrier number density. We propose an appropriate experimental setup to probe these spin-orbit dependent magnetotransport properties, which will permit one to extract the spin-orbit coefficient directly from the magnetotransport.