Beyond the Rashba model

We analyze some common approximations made in connection with the Rashba effect, where a macroscopic electric field gives rise to a spin splitting. We demonstrate that the size of the Rashba splitting is not given by the expectation value of the electric field or some other average electric field, as is commonly assumed. Instead we find that the local electric field near an interface of a wide asymmetric modulation-doped quantum well can give rise to a Rashba splitting that is an order of magnitude larger than expected from the average electric field. The localization of the wave functions of the spin subbands can be quite sensitive to the parallel wave vector. Clear deviations from an energy-independent wave vector splitting occur when nonparabolicity is taken into account.