Magnetosubbands of semiconductor quantum wires with Rashba spin-orbit coupling

We have investigated the electronic structure of Rashba spin-split quantum wires in a magnetic field. For our numerical calculations, a harmonic confinement was assumed. We find that wire structures with several occupied one-dimensional subbands still exhibit a beating pattern in the magnetoresistance. The wire width turns out to strongly affect the magnetic field values at which nodes occur in the beating pattern. In the limit of narrow wires, the beating pattern would vanish altogether because spin-split subbands become populated equally.