Ideal Two-Dimensional Electron Systems with a Giant Rashba-Type Spin Splitting in Real Materials: Surfaces of Bismuth Tellurohalides

Spintronics is aimed at actively controlling and manipulating the spin degrees of freedom in semiconductor devices. A promising way to achieve this goal is to make use of the tunable Rashba effect that relies on the spin-orbit interaction in a two-dimensional electron system immersed in an inversion-asymmetric environment. The spin-orbit-induced spin splitting of the two-dimensional electron state provides a basis for many theoretically proposed spintronic devices. However, the lack of semiconductors with large Rashba effect hinders realization of these devices in actual practice. Here we report on a giant Rashba-type spin splitting in two-dimensional electron systems that reside at tellurium-terminated surfaces of bismuth tellurohalides. Among these semiconductors, BiTeCl stands out for its isotropic metallic surface-state band with the (Gamma) over bar -point energy lying deep inside the bulk band gap. The giant spin splitting of this band ensures a substantial spin asymmetry of the inelastic mean free path of quasiparticles with different spin orientations.