  When a foreign atom is placed on a surface of a metal, the surrounding sea of
electrons responds screening the additional charge leading to oscillations or
ripples. On surfaces, those electrons are sometimes confined to two-dimensional
surface states, whose spin-degeneracy is lifted due to the Rashba effect
arising from the spin-orbit interaction of electrons and the inversion
asymmetric environment. It is believed that at least for a single adatom
scanning tunneling microscopy measurements are insensitive to the Rashba
splitting i.e. no signatures in the charge oscillations will be observed.
Resting on scattering theory, we demonstrate that, if magnetic, one single
adatom is enough to visualize the presence of the Rashba effect in terms of an
induced spin-magnetization of the surrounding electrons exhibiting a twisted
spin texture described as superposition of two skyrmionic waves of opposite
chirality.
