2018/08/16 by Sinha, Debabrata, Bhattacharjee, Jayanta K.
#FOS: Physical sciences #Strongly Correlated Electrons (cond-mat.str-el)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1808.05397
We use Ehrenfest's theorem to provide a particularly simple derivation of the \em zitterbewegung in the dynamics of initial Gaussian wave packets in a two-dimensional electron gas. For initial packets which are very wide in the y-direction, the \em zitterbewegung is only in the y-component of the velocity. We extend our Ehrenfest theorem based calculation to the spin-orbit coupled spinor Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) to predict that there can be \em zitterbewegung in the x-component of the velocity in this situation driven by a combination of the nonlinear interaction in the condensate and the splitting due to the spin-orbit coupling.