Unconventional transport in low-density two-dimensional Rashba systems

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 ultra-low-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 new 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.

arXiv comment15 pages, 13 figures

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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Electron-electron scattering and transport properties of spin-orbit coupled electron gas
• Spin-orbit related power-law dependence of the diffusive conductivity on the carrier density in disordered Rashba two-dimensional electron systems
• Two-particle scattering and resistivity of Rashba electron gas
• Rashba Spin-Orbit Coupling and Nonlocal Correlations in Disordered 2D Systems