Topological Protection from Random Rashba Spin-Orbit Backscattering: Ballistic Transport in a Helical Luttinger Liquid
Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics
2016-02-26 v2 Strongly Correlated Electrons
Abstract
The combination of Rashba spin-orbit coupling and potential disorder induces a random current operator for the edge states of a 2D topological insulator. We prove that charge transport through such an edge is ballistic at any temperature, with or without Luttinger liquid interactions. The solution exploits a mapping to a spin 1/2 in a time-dependent field that preserves the projection along one randomly undulating component (integrable dynamics). Our result is exact and rules out random Rashba backscattering as a source of temperature-dependent transport, absent integrability-breaking terms.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1601.01684,
title = {Topological Protection from Random Rashba Spin-Orbit Backscattering: Ballistic Transport in a Helical Luttinger Liquid},
author = {Hong-Yi Xie and Heqiu Li and Yang-Zhi Chou and Matthew S. Foster},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1601.01684},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
6+3 pages, 2+1 figures