Theory of spin Coulomb drag in spin-polarized transport

Abstract

We introduce a distinctive feature of spin-polarized transport, the spin Coulomb drag: there is an intrinsic source of friction for spin currents due to the Coulomb interaction between spin “up” and spin “down” electrons. We calculate the associated “spin trans-resistivity” in a generalized random-phase approximation and show that, to the leading order in the interactions, it has no contribution from correlated impurity scattering. We show that, in an appropriate range of parameters, such resistivity is measurable, and we propose an experiment to measure it.