Disorder-Induced Broadening of the Density of States for 2D Electrons with Strong Spin-Orbit Coupling

Abstract

We study theoretically the disorder-induced smearing of the density of states in a two-dimensional electron system taking into account a spin-orbit term in the Hamiltonian of a free electron. We show that the characteristic energy scale for the smearing increases with increasing the spin-orbit coupling. We also demonstrate that in the limit of a strong spin-orbit coupling the diagrams with self-intersections give a parametrically small contribution to the self-energy. As a result, the coherent potential approximation becomes asymptotically exact in this limit. The tail of the density of states has the energy scale which is much smaller than the magnitude of the smearing. We find the shape of the tail using the instanton approach.

12 pages, REVTeX, 4 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Magnetic Field Suppression of the Conducting Phase in Two Dimensions
• Instability of the Two-Dimensional Metallic Phase to Parallel Magnetic Field
• Unconventional Metallic State in Two Dimensional System With Broken Inversion Symmetry

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• Spatial trends of non-collinear exchange coupling mediated by itinerant carriers with different Fermi surfaces
• Unconventional transport in low-density two-dimensional Rashba systems
• Spin-orbit related power-law dependence of the diffusive conductivity on the carrier density in disordered Rashba two-dimensional electron systems
• Rashba Spin-Orbit Coupling and Nonlocal Correlations in Disordered 2D Systems
• Long-living excited states of a 2D diamagnetic exciton