Conventional electrical engineering relies a characteristic property of electrons to store, manipulate and transfer information, namely their charge. The research field of spintronics, on the other hand, is based on the idea of employing another fundamental property of electrons for these purposes: their spin. The major challenge is twofold: i) inducing and controlling the magnetic excitation (storing and manipulating information); ii) converting the magnetic perturbation into an electrically-detectable signal. The latter challenge is necessary in order to integrate a possible spintronic device with nowadays available CMOS technology. Both these challenging tasks have to be performed in the fastest possible way (high operational frequency of devices) and with the minimum amount of energy dissipations. A class of promising materials in this context are systems in which the so-called Rashba effect is observed: this effect leads to a spin-dependent splitting of the conduction band due to spin-orbit coupling. In my research, I am concerned with investigating how this coupling can be controlled on an ultrafast time scale.