Piezoelectric manipulation of spin-orbit coupling in a Wurtzite heterostructure

The combination of piezoelectricity and spin-orbit coupling (SOC) effect makes wurtzite semiconductors attractive for the development of exotic spin-related physics as well as spintronic applications. Triggering piezoelectricity, particularly by an external stimulus, provides a new perspective for manipulating SOC, but until now, a comprehensive understanding of this mechanism is lacking. Herein, by means of self-consistent calculations and Löwdin perturbation approach, we have explored the manipulation of SOC in the wurtzite (Al, Ga)N/GaN heterostructure by external stress-induced piezoelectric polarization. The results suggest that the Rashba SOC depends weakly on stress due to the wide-gap feature of the wurtzite crystal that makes Rashba SOC predominant by a bulk term instead of the structural inversion term. The piezoelectric polarization diminishes and even turns off Dresselhaus coupling by reducing the interfacial electric field. Moreover, piezoelectricity is shown to improve the poorly gate-tunable SOC. In the heterostructure with two occupied subbands, the Dresselhaus coupling of the second subband is more sensitive than the first one in response to stress. As an extension, we further demonstrate that the correlation effect in the wurtzite heterostructure can be significantly enhanced by piezoelectric polarization. This study offers an in-depth insight into piezoelectric modulation of spin-orbit physics, which has the potential for stimulating new quantum correlation states or designing functional spintronic devices.