Electronic band splitting and spin texture induced by Dresselhaus spin-orbit coupling in ZnTe

ZnTe is a fcc p-type II-VI semiconductor with a direct band gap of 2.26 eV and a wide range of applications. Despite its importance in modern electronic applications, up to now, there is surprisingly no high-resolution ARPES data allowing a complete understanding of its electronic structure.
Recently, using high-resolution ARPES and DFT calculations, we found that spin-orbit coupling (SOC) plays a crucial role in determining the band structure of ZnTe. More importantly, due to the lack of inversion symmetry in the ZnTe bulk unit cell, a Dresselhaus spin-splitting with a large spin polarisation comes into play. According to our calculations, this effect, never observed so far in this technologically important material, is larger along the \Gamma-K direction in ZnTe’s bulk electronic structure. Thus we propose to characterize the band dispersion along \Gamma-K and its spin texture by using high-resolution ARPES and spin-resolved ARPES.