Spin drift-diffusion for two-subband quantum wells*

Controlling the spin dynamics and spin lifetimes is one of the main challenges in spintronics. To this end, the study of the spin diffusion in two-dimensional electron gases (2DEGs) shows that when the Rashba and Dresselhaus spin-orbit couplings (SOC) are balanced, a persistent spin helix regime arises. There, a striped spin pattern shows a long lifetime, limited only by the cubic Dresselhaus SOC, and its dynamics can be controlled by in-plane drift fields. Here, we derive a spin diffusion equation for non-degenerate two-subbands 2DEGs. We show that the intersubband scattering rate enters as a new knob to control the spin dynamics, which is defined by the overlap of the square of the wavefunctions, and can be controlled by electric fields. We find that for large intersubband couplings the dynamics follows an effective diffusion matrix given by approximately half of the subband-averaged matrices. This extra 1/2 factor arises from Matthiessen's rule summing over the intra- and intersubband scattering rates and leads to a reduced diffusion constant and larger spin lifetimes. We illustrate our findings with numerical solutions of the diffusion equation with parameters extracted from realistic Schrödinger-Poisson calculations.