No Arabic abstract
We consider the problem of confining the famously elusive Dirac-like quasiparticles, as found in some recently discovered low-dimensional systems. After briefly surveying the existing theoretical proposals for creating bound states in Dirac materials, we study relativistic excitations with a position-dependent mass term. With the aid of an exactly-solvable model, we show how bound states begin to emerge after a critical condition on the size of the mass term is met. We also reveal some exotic properties of the unusual confinement discovered, including an elegant chevron structure of the bound state energies as a function of the size of the mass.
In this work the above-band gap absorption spectrum in two-dimensional Dirac materials is calculated with account for the interaction between the photocarriers. Both the screened Rytova-Keldysh and pure Coulomb attraction potentials between the electron and hole are used in the study. We find that, in the materials under consideration, the interaction enhances the absorbance in the narrow interband edge region, in a sharp contrast to the band model with the parabolic free-carrier energy dispersion. We develop an approximation of the weak interaction which allows us to reproduce the main features of the exactly calculated Sommerfeld factor. We show a substantial reduction of this factor at higher frequencies due to the single-particle energy renormalization.
Exciton problem is solved in the two-dimensional Dirac model with allowance for strong electron-hole attraction. The exciton binding energy is assumed smaller than but comparable to the band gap. The exciton wavefunction is found in the momentum space as a superposition of all four two-particle states including electron and hole states with both positive and negative energies. The matrix element of exciton generation is shown to depend on the additional components of the exciton wavefunction. Both the Coulomb and the Rytova-Keldysh potentials are considered. The dependence of the binding energy on the coupling constant is analyzed for the ground and first excited exciton states. The binding energy and the oscillator strength are studied as functions of the environmental-dependent dielectric constant for real transition metal dichalcogenide monolayers. We demonstrate that the multicomponent nature of the exciton wavefunction is crucial for description of resonant optical properties of two-dimensional Dirac systems.
We show that the conductivity of a two-dimensional electron gas can be intrinsically anisotropic despite isotropic Fermi surface, energy dispersion, and disorder configuration. In the model we study, the anisotropy stems from the interplay between Dirac and Schrodinger features combined in a special two-band Hamiltonian describing the quasiparticles similar to the low-energy excitations in phosphorene. As a result, even scalar isotropic disorder scattering alters the nature of the carriers and results in anisotropic transport. Solving the Boltzmann equation exactly for such carriers with point-like random impurities we find a hidden knob to control the anisotropy just by tuning either the Fermi energy or temperature. Our results are expected to be generally applicable beyond the model studied here, and should stimulate further search for the alternative ways to control electron transport in advanced materials.
We analyze the valley selection rules for optical transitions from impurity states to the conduction band in two-dimensional Dirac materials, taking a monolayer of MoS2 as an example. We employ the analytical model of a shallow impurity potential which localizes electrons described by a spinor wave function, and, first, find the system eigenstates taking into account the presence of two valleys in the Brillouin zone. Then, we find the spectrum of the absorbance and calculate the photon-drag electric current due to the impurity-band transitions, drawing the general conclusions regarding the valley optical selection rules for the impurity-band optical transitions in gapped Dirac materials.
The spin polarization induced by the spin Hall effect (SHE) in thin films typically points out of the plane. This is rooted not in a fundamental constraint but on the specific symmetries of traditionally studied systems. We theoretically show that the reduced symmetry of strong spin-orbit coupling materials such as ${rm MoTe}_2$ or ${rm WTe}_2$ enables new forms of intrinsic SHE that produce large and robust in-plane spin polarizations. Through quantum transport calculations on realistic device geometries with disorder, we show that the charge-to-spin interconversion efficiency can reach $theta_{xy} approx 80$% and is gate tunable. The numerically extracted spin diffusion lengths ($lambda_s$) are long and yield large values of the figure of merit $lambda_stheta_{xy}sim 8text{--}10$ nm, largely superior to conventional SHE materials. These findings vividly emphasize how crystal symmetry governs the intrinsic SHE, and how it can be exploited to broaden the range and efficiency of spintronic functionalities.