2017/06/30 by Joel Hutchinson, Joseph Maciejko · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #Condensed matter physics #Physics #Quantum and electron transport phenomena #Quantum mechanics #Scattering #Scattering length #Scattering theory #Topological Materials and Phenomena #cond-mat.mes-hall #cond-mat.quant-gas #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevb.96.125304
published as Phys. Rev. B 96, 125304 (2017) · Editors' Suggestion. 13 pages, 6 figures
arxiv created 2017/09/18 · openalex publication_date 2017/09/18 · arxiv updated 2017/09/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Materials with Rashba spin-orbit coupling have long been known to exhibit interesting transport properties due to their unique spin-momentum locking. However, the topology of the dispersion itself has an even more striking impact on electron-impurity scattering, which is only observable at ultralow energies. The authors investigate the universal properties of 2D electron scattering off of circularly symmetric potentials in this regime by deriving nonperturbative approximations for the low-energy scattering quantities, including the T-matrix, S-matrix, and scattering cross section. As the energy of the electron approaches the bottom of the lowest spin-split band, a number of unusual features appear: the low-energy S and T matrices become independent of the potential, all partial waves contribute equally, and the total scattering cross section exhibits quantized plateaus.