Helical gaps in interacting Rashba wires at low electron densities

Abstract

Rashba spin-orbit coupling and a magnetic field perpendicular to the Rashba axis have been predicted to open a partial gap ("helical gap") in the energy spectrum of noninteracting or weakly interacting one-dimensional quantum wires. By comparing kinetic energy and Coulomb energy we show that this gap opening typically occurs at low electron densities where the Coulomb energy dominates. To address this strongly correlated limit, we investigate Rashba wires using Wigner crystal theory. We find that the helical gap exists even in the limit of strong interactions but its dependence on electron density differs significantly from the weakly interacting case. In particular, we find that the critical magnetic field for opening the gap becomes an oscillatory function of electron density. This changes strongly the expected signature of the helical gap in conductance measurements.

4 pages main text, 6 pages appendix, 6 figures

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Cited by in corpus (14)

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• Dynamic response functions and helical gaps in interacting Rashba nanowires with and without magnetic fields
• Missing Shapiro steps and the $8\pi$-periodic Josephson effect in interacting helical electron systems
• Bosonization for fermions and parafermions
• Conductance of fractional Luttinger liquids at finite temperatures
• Interaction effects in a microscopic quantum wire model with strong spin-orbit interaction
• Phase diagram of spin-$1$ chains with Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction
• Spin-orbit coupling in quasi-one-dimensional Wigner crystals
• Electron-electron interactions in partially mixed helical states
• Overlap of parafermionic zero modes at a finite distance
• Symmetry-protected spin gaps in quantum wires
• Sub-gap Fano resonances in a topological superconducting wire with on-site Coulomb interactions
• Exceptional Luttinger Liquids from sublattice dependent interaction