Now this is a topic that really took me a while to fully comprehend. Spin Orbit Coupling… what is it? Well, we probably already knew that an electron carries charge, and we have learned that an electron also has an intrinsic angular momentum (spin) and as a result, it also has an intrinsic magnetic moment. How does this effect the motion (orbital momentum) of an electron moving through an electric field? Let’s think about it…
- An electron has an intrinsic magnetic moment. (northern field facing up or facing down, as a result of spin aka “Classically non-describable two-valuedness“)
- An electric field acts upon the electron.
- The electron perceives the electric field as effective magnetic field (more on this later)
- This perceived magnetic field interacts with the intrinsic magnetic moment, binding the orientation of the electron spin (spin-up or spin-down) to its direction of motion
- As a result, spin-up electrons and spin-down electrons scatter differently and in opposite transverse directions (more on this later too)
The binding of an electron’s spin (intrinsic angular momentum) and its motion (orbital angular momentum) is known as Spin Orbit Coupling because as the name suggests, it couples its spin with its orbit.
This phenomenon results in a lot of interesting effects, of which I will continue to discuss through these blog posts.
The following textbook by Vincent Baltz has been a huge aid in helping me understand this topic. I am in the process of writing a much more formal and technical paper (my master thesis) on this, and will keep this platform as a relatively informal method of mind dumping what I am learning. Thanks for learning with me!
