Effects of spin-orbit interaction and electron correlations in strontium titanate

Abstract

We show that the Bloch states in the conduction band of SrTiO${}_3$ arise from the interplay between highly anisotropic hopping in sub-bands derived from the Ti $t_{2g}$ orbitals and spin-orbit coupling that mixes these orbitals. Because of the nearly flat-band characteristics for one of the principal axes, at sufficiently high doping these Bloch states become unstable with respect to electron interactions, resulting in Mott-like singlet correlations. These findings may be relevant to the anomalous electronic properties of SrTiO${}_3$, including its unusual superconductivity.

arXiv commentVersion published in Phys. Rev. B

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Cited by in corpus (1)

• Symmetry constraints on the orbital transport in solids