Unconventional dc transport in Rashba electron gases
Abstract
We discuss the transport properties of a disordered two-dimensional electron gas with strong Rashba spin-orbit coupling. We show that in the high-density regime where the Fermi energy overcomes the energy associated with spin-orbit coupling, dc transport is accurately described by a standard Drude's law, due to a non-trivial compensation between the suppression of back-scattering and the relativistic correction to the quasi-particle velocity. On the contrary, when the system enters the opposite dominant spin-orbit regime, Drude's paradigm breaks down and the dc conductivity becomes strongly sensitive to the spin-orbit coupling strength, providing a suitable tool to test the entanglement between spin and charge degrees of freedom in these
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1506.01944,
title = {Unconventional dc transport in Rashba electron gases},
author = {Valentina Brosco and Lara Benfatto and Emmanuele Cappelluti and Claudio Grimaldi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1506.01944},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
6 pages, 4 figures+Supplemental Material. To appear in Phys. Rev. Lett