Orbital Rashba effect and its detection by circular dichroism angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy

We show, by way of tight-binding and first-principles calculations, that a one-to-one correspondence between an electron's crystal momentum k and nonzero orbital angular momentum (OAM) is a generic feature of surface bands. The OAM forms a chiral structure in momentum space much as its spin counterpart in Rashba model does, as a consequence of the inherent inversion symmetry breaking at the surface but not of spin-orbit interaction. This is the orbital counterpart of conventional Rashba effect and may be called the orbital Rashba effect. The circular dichroism (CD) angle-resolved photoemission (ARPES) method is an efficient way to detect this new order, and we derive formulas explicitly relating the CD-ARPES signal to the existence of OAM in the band structure. The cases of degenerate p- and d-orbital bands are considered.