Unconventional transport in low-density two-dimensional Rashba systems

Joel Hutchinson and Joseph Maciejko
Phys. Rev. B 98, 195305 – Published 14 November 2018

Abstract

Rashba spin-orbit coupling appears in 2D systems lacking inversion symmetry, and causes the spin-splitting of otherwise degenerate energy bands into an upper and lower helicity band. In this paper, we explore how impurity scattering affects transport in the ultralow density regime where electrons are confined to the lower helicity band. A previous study has investigated the conductivity in this regime using a treatment in the first Born approximation. In this work, we use the full T matrix to uncover features of the conductivity. We first compute the conductivity within a semiclassical Boltzmann framework and show that it exhibits an unconventional density dependence due to the unusual features of the group velocity in the single-particle dispersion, as well as quantized plateaus as a function of the logarithm of the electron density. We support this with a calculation using the Kubo formula and find that these plateaus persist in the full quantum theory. We suggest that this quantization may be seen in a pump-probe experiment.

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  • Received 8 August 2018
  • Revised 26 October 2018

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.98.195305

©2018 American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Condensed Matter, Materials & Applied Physics

Authors & Affiliations

Joel Hutchinson1,* and Joseph Maciejko1,2,3,†

  • 1Department of Physics, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2E1, Canada
  • 2Theoretical Physics Institute, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2E1, Canada
  • 3Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Toronto, Ontario M5G 1Z8, Canada

  • *jhutchin@ualberta.ca
  • maciejko@ualberta.ca

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Issue

Vol. 98, Iss. 19 — 15 November 2018

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