Tunnel junction of helical edge states: Determining and controlling spin-preserving and spin-flipping processes through transconductance

When a constriction is realized in a 2D quantum spin Hall system, electron tunneling between helical edge states occurs via two types of channels allowed by time-reversal symmetry, namely spin-preserving (p) and spin-flipping (f) tunneling processes. Determining and controlling the effects of these two channels is crucial to the application of helical edge states in spintronics. We show that, despite that the Hamiltonian terms describing these two processes do not commute, the scattering matrix entries of the related 4-terminal setup always factorize into products of p-term and f-term contributions. Such factorization provides an operative way to determine the transmission coefficients Tp and Tf related to each of the two processes, via transconductance measurements. Furthermore, these transmission coefficients are also found to be controlled independently by a suitable combination of two gate voltages applied across the junction. This result holds for an arbitrary profile of the tunneling amplitudes, including disorder in the tunnel region, enabling us to discuss the effect of the finite length of the tunnel junction, and the space modulation of both magnitude and phase of the tunneling amplitudes.