Dresselhaus spin-orbit coupling induced spin-polarization and resonance-split in n-well semiconductor superlattices

Using the transfer matrix method. we investigate the electron transmission over multiple-well semiconductor superlattices with Dresselhaus spin-orbit coupling in the potential-well regions. The superlattice structure enhances the effect of spin polarization in the transmission spectrum. The minibands of multiple-well superlattices for electrons with different spin can be completely separated at the low incident energy, leading to the 100% spin polarization in a broad energy windows, which may be an effective scheme for realizing spin filtering. Moreover, for the transmission over n-quantum-well, it is observed that the resonance peaks in the minibands split into n-folds or (n - 1)-folds depending on the well-width and barrier-thickness, which is different from the case of tunneling through n-barrier structure. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.spin-orbit coupling induced spin-polarization and resonance-split in n-well semiconductor superlattices