Spin and charge transport in a gated two dimensional electron gas

The work presented in this thesis is centered around the idea of how one can inject, transport and detect the electron's spin in a two dimensional electron gas (a semiconductor heterostructure). Metal based spintronic devices have been established to be the easy way to implement spintronic concepts while the semiconductor based spintronic devices lagged behind due to the fundamental obstacle in injecting spins from ferromagnetic materials known as conductivity mismatch. The possibility of the gate control of spin transport in the later devices kept the interest of spin transport in semiconductors high. This interest is motivated also by fundamental physics of electron's spin, physics which still raises questions with no definitive answer so far (the so called '0.7 structure).