No Arabic abstract
The spatial distribution of electric current under magnetic field and the resultant orbital magnetism have been studied for two-dimensional electrons under a harmonic confining potential $V(vecvar{r})=m omega_0^2 r^2/2$ in various regimes of temperature and magnetic field, and the microscopic conditions for the validity of Landau diamagnetism are clarified. Under a weak magnetic field $(omega_clsimomega_0, omega_c$ being a cyclotron frequency) and at low temperature $(Tlsimhbaromega_0)$, where the orbital magnetic moment fluctuates as a function of the field, the currents are irregularly distributed paramagnetically or diamagnetically inside the bulk region. As the temperature is raised under such a weak field, however, the currents in the bulk region are immediately reduced and finally there only remains the diamagnetic current flowing along the edge. At the same time, the usual Landau diamagnetism results for the total magnetic moment. The origin of this dramatic temperature dependence is seen to be in the multiple reflection of electron waves by the boundary confining potential, which becomes important once the coherence length of electrons gets longer than the system length. Under a stronger field $(omega_cgsimomega_0)$, on the other hand, the currents in the bulk region cause de Haas-van Alphen effect at low temperature as $Tlsimhbaromega_c$. As the temperature gets higher $(Tgsimhbaromega_c)$ under such a strong field, the bulk currents are reduced and the Landau diamagnetism by the edge current is recovered.
The orbital susceptibility for graphene is calculated exactly up to the first order with respect to the overlap integrals between neighboring atomic orbitals. The general and rigorous theory of orbital susceptibility developed in the preceding paper is applied to a model for graphene as a typical two-band model. It is found that there are contributions from interband, Fermi surface, and occupied states in addition to the Landau--Peierls orbital susceptibility. The relative phase between the atomic orbitals on the two sublattices related to the chirality of Dirac cones plays an important role. It is shown that there are some additional contributions to the orbital susceptibility that are not included in the previous calculations using the Peierls phase in the tight-binding model for graphene. The physical origin of this difference is clarified in terms of the corrections to the Peierls phase.
We study orbital magnetism in a three-dimensional (3D) quantum dot with a parabolic confining potential. We calculate the free energy of the system as a function of the magnetic field and the temperature. By this, we show that the temperature-field plane can be classified into three regions in terms of the characteristic behavior of the magnetization: the Landau diamagnetism, de Haas-van Alphen oscillation and mesoscopic fluctuation of magnetization. We also calculate numerically the magnetization of the system and then the current density distribution. As for the oscillation of the magnetization when the field is varied, the 3D quantum dot shows a longer period than a 2D quantum dot which contains the same number of electrons. A large paramagnetism appears at low temperatures when the magnetic field is very weak.
Dirac particles have been notoriously difficult to confine. Implementing a curved space Dirac equation solver based on the quantum Lattice Boltzmann method, we show that curvature in a 2-D space can confine a portion of a charged, mass-less Dirac fermion wave-packet. This is equivalent to a finite probability of confining the Dirac fermion within a curved space region. We propose a general power law expression for the probability of confinement with respect to average spatial curvature for the studied geometry.
The orbital-Hall effect (OHE), similarly to the spin-Hall effect (SHE), refers to the creation of a transverse flow of orbital angular momentum that is induced by a longitudinally applied electric field. For systems in which the spin-orbit coupling (SOC) is sizeable, the orbital and spin angular momentum degrees of freedom are coupled, and an interrelationship between charge, spin and orbital angular momentum excitations is naturally established. The OHE has been explored mostly in metallic systems, where it can be quite strong. However, several of its features remain unexplored in two-dimensional (2D) materials. Here, we investigate the role of orbital textures for the OHE displayed by multi-orbital 2D materials. We predict the appearance of a rather large orbital Hall effect in these systems both in their metallic and insulating phases. In some cases, the orbital Hall currents are larger than the spin Hall ones, and their use as information carriers widens the development possibilities of novel spin-orbitronic devices.
Quantum point contacts (QPCs) have shown promise as nanoscale spin-selective components for spintronic applications and are of fundamental interest in the study of electron many-body effects such as the 0.7 x 2e^2/h anomaly. We report on the dependence of the 1D Lande g-factor g* and 0.7 anomaly on electron density and confinement in QPCs with two different top-gate architectures. We obtain g* values up to 2.8 for the lowest 1D subband, significantly exceeding previous in-plane g-factor values in AlGaAs/GaAs QPCs, and approaching that in InGaAs/InP QPCs. We show that g* is highly sensitive to confinement potential, particularly for the lowest 1D subband. This suggests careful management of the QPCs confinement potential may enable the high g* desirable for spintronic applications without resorting to narrow-gap materials such as InAs or InSb. The 0.7 anomaly and zero-bias peak are also highly sensitive to confining potential, explaining the conflicting density dependencies of the 0.7 anomaly in the literature.