1. Influence of Rashba spin-orbit coupling on the Kondo effect.
- Author
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Wong, Arturo, Ulloa, Sergio E., Sandler, Nancy, and Ingersent, Kevin
- Subjects
- *
SPIN-orbit interactions , *RASHBA effect , *KONDO effect - Abstract
An Anderson model for a magnetic impurity in a two-dimensional electron gas with bulk Rashba spin-orbit interaction is solved using the numerical renormalization group under two different experimental scenarios. For a fixed Fermi energy, the Kondo temperature TK varies weakly with Rashba coupling λR, as reported previously. If instead the band filling is low and held constant, increasing λR can drive the system into a helical regime with exponential enhancement of TK. Under either scenario, thermodynamic properties at low temperatures T exhibit the same dependencies on T/TK as are found for λR=0. Unlike the conventional Kondo effect, however, the impurity exhibits static spin correlations with conduction electrons of nonzero orbital angular momentum about the impurity site. We also consider a magnetic field that Zeeman splits the conduction band but not the impurity level, an effective picture that arises under a proposed route to access the helical regime in a driven system. The impurity contribution to the system's ground-state angular momentum is found to be a universal function of the ratio of the Zeeman energy to a temperature scale that is not TK (as would be the case in a magnetic field that couples directly to the impurity spin), but rather is proportional to TK divided by the impurity hybridization width. This universal scaling is explained via a perturbative treatment of field-induced changes in the electronic density of states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2016
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