We study the dynamics of a spin-polarized wave packet in a disordered Rashba two-dimensional (2D) electron gas and identify a jittery quantum boomerang effect in which longitudinal and transverse motion return to the origin through fundamentally distinct mechanisms. Starting from an initial state with finite momentum along $x$ and spin polarized along $z$, we calculate the time evolution by combining a Chebyshev expansion of the time-evolution operator with a disorder ensemble average. In the weak-scattering regime, equations of motion derived from the quantum kinetic equation reproduce the numerical trends and show that impurity scattering acts as a viscous damping mechanism that suppresses the transient Zitterbewegung and drives the transverse displacement back to $y=0$ at long times. Conversely, the longitudinal dynamics show a Drude-like saturation at weak disorder. These results are consistent with the vanishing intrinsic spin Hall conductivity in the disordered Rashba model and with experimental observations of a transient intrinsic spin Hall effect in the time domain. As disorder increases, the longitudinal dynamics evolve to a partial return toward the origin, which signals a transition from weak antilocalization to Anderson localization in 2D.

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• Anderson localization
• Inverse spin Hall effect
• Rashba coupling
• Spin Hall effect
• Spin diffusion
• Spin relaxation
• Weak antilocalization
• Two-dimensional electron gas
• Boltzmann theory
• Nonequilibrium Green's function
• Symmetries in condensed matter