All-electrical detection of the relative strength of Rashba and Dresselhaus spin-orbit interaction in quantum wires.

We propose a method to determine the relative strength of Rashba and Dresselhaus spin-orbit interaction from transport measurements without the need of fitting parameters. To this end, we make use of the conductance anisotropy in narrow quantum wires with respect to the directions of an in-plane magnetic field, the quantum wire, and the crystal orientation. We support our proposal by numerical calculations of the conductance of quantum wires based on the Landauer formalism which show the applicability of the method to a wide range of parameters.