https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2015-60257-4
Regular Article
Gauge transformations of spin-orbit interactions in graphene
1
Groupe de Physique Statistique, Institut Jean Lamour, Université
de Lorraine, 54506
Vandoeuvre-les-Nancy,
France
2
Centro de Física, Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones
Científicas, 21827
Caracas, 1020 A, Venezuela
3
Escuela de Física, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad Central de
Venezuela, 1040
Caracas,
Venezuela
4
Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of
Regensburg, 93040
Regensburg,
Germany
5
Universidad de Investigación de Tecnología Experimental YACHAY
Ciudad del Conocimiento, 100119
San Miguel de Urcuqui,
Ecuador
a
e-mail: bertrand.berche@univ-lorraine.fr
Received: 30 March 2015
Received in final form: 2 June 2015
Published online: 10 August 2015
Inclusion of spin-dependent interactions in graphene in the vicinity of the Dirac points can be posed in terms of non-Abelian gauge potentials. Such gauge potentials being surrogates of physical electric fields and material parameters, only enjoy a limited gauge freedom. A general gauge transformation thus changes the physical model. We argue that this property can be useful in connecting reference physical situations, such as free particle or Rashba interactions to non-trivial physical Hamiltonians with a new set of spin-orbit interactions, albeit constrained to being isoenergetic. We analyse different combinations of spin-orbit interactions in the case of monolayer graphene and show how they are related by means of selected non-Abelian gauge transformations.
Key words: Mesoscopic and Nanoscale Systems
© EDP Sciences, Società Italiana di Fisica, Springer-Verlag, 2015